Spending on public cloud services in the Asia Pacific region – excluding Japan – will hit $15 billion in 2018, representing an increase of 35% over the year before, according to IDC.

The findings show that while annual spending growth in the APeJ region will slow between the 2016 and 2021 forecast period, 2021 will see a total of $32.27bn. Spending on public cloud services this year will be driven by banking, with a spend of $1.85bn, ahead of professional services ($1.75bn) and discrete manufacturing ($1.63bn).

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) will be the largest category of public cloud spending this year, IDC says, as global data centre providers gain more traction in the region. IaaS will contribute almost half (47.6%) to overall cloud spending in the region, just ahead of software as a service (SaaS) on 45.8% and well ahead of platform as a service (PaaS), although application platforms, which are part of the PaaS bucket, will see the quickest spending of all the areas.

Of the countries analysed in the APeJ region, China will be seen as the largest market for public cloud services in 2018 with $5.44bn, or around 36% of the overall spend. Australia, at $2.85bn, and India ($2.12bn), in second and third.

“China and India, the two largest markets in APeJ will account for about 60% of the region’s cloud market size,” said Ashutosh Bisht, IDC Asia Pacific research manager for customer insights and analysis. “The Chinese government has been actively promoting the development of the high-tech industry, and continues to implement its Internet+ strategy is a leading factor for China’s adoption to cloud technology.

“For India, accelerated demand by enterprises and government towards the implementation of new technology like blockchain, AI [and] IoT is making the cloud a bare necessity,” Bisht added.

According to the most recent report from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), Hong Kong was seen as the most ‘cloud-ready’ Asia Pacific nation, ahead of Singapore and New Zealand. Australia and Japan finished fourth and fifth respectively, with China down at #13.

Storage provider Cloudian says it has achieved record growth for the third year in a row, with revenues up in every geographic segment and particular expansion in Europe.

The company’s results ‘point to the exploding need for scale-out storage solutions in an era when artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, high-resolution video and other data-intensive applications require businesses to manage data that is growing at an unprecedented rate’, in Cloudian’s own words.

Cloudian offers petabyte-scalable object and file storage, with its primary products, HyperStore and HyperFile, being based on object storage and enterprise network attached storage (NAS) file services respectively. Last month, the company issued its most recent update to HyperStore, the most interesting feature being around multi-cloud capability. Users can now employ a single API to access storage assets on-prem and in public clouds, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. Other features include unified data management and scale-out architecture.

Among the list of achievements Cloudian was crowing about in 2017 included growing its customer base by 100%, an extended EMEA presence with new teams in France, Germany and Italy, as well as expanding to 130 employees. On the partnership side, alongside the hyperscalers mentioned above, HP Enterprise, Lenovo and Cisco were mentioned. Cloudian also explored AI use cases and partnerships in 2017, including NVIDIA and Xcompass.

“Throughout 2017, Cloudian delivered record-high revenues in all four quarters by responding to the tsunami of data that modern technologies are creating,” said Michael Tso, CEO of Cloudian in a statement. “This growth was accompanied by an equally remarkable growth in repeat customer revenue, which is a testament to our employees’ and partners’ commitment to solving our customers’ expanding need for innovative storage solutions.”

The company has thus far raised $79 million in capital, the most recent being a $41m series D round in October 2016.

Juniper Networks has announced the launch of an expanded portfolio which includes helping organisations become ‘multi-cloud ready’.

The Sunnyvale-based network and infrastructure provider is including a variety of new offerings in the data centre, campus and branch aspects.

On the campus side – ‘recognising that campus networks will play an integral role in multi-cloud security and operations’, as the company puts it – the features include simplified management as well as new switches. For branch networks, Juniper is launching a new network services platform, while the company is also unveiling a secure cloud connectivity offering.

Each new product is going to be powered by the Juniper Networks Junos operating system, the company added.

“The promise of multi-cloud is to deliver an infrastructure that is secure, ubiquitous, reliable and fungible and where the mitigation of workloads will be a simple and intuitive process,” said Bikash Koley, Juniper chief technology officer. “For IT to be successful in becoming multi-cloud ready, it is critical organisations consider not only the data centre and public cloud, but also the on-ramps of their campus and branch networks.

“Otherwise, enterprises will face fractured security and operations as network boundaries prevent seamless, end to end visibility and control,” added Koley.

The argument around campus networks becoming vital to multi-cloud operations is an interesting one. Writing for this publication back in 2016, Ayu Shah, director of systems and sales engineering at networking provider Pica8, argued that in the coming years campus networks will ‘become far more complex and difficult to manage’ through traditional element and network management systems. “Software-defined networking is an ideal methodology to push policies to campus networks in a systematic and automated way,” wrote Shah.

You can find the full list of Juniper’s announcements here.

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