The vast majority of Asia Pacific organisations remain early in their cloud maturity according to IDC – with either ‘ad hoc’ or ‘opportunistic’ initiatives the order of the day for now.
The findings appear in the analyst firm’s latest IDC MaturityScape Benchmark, for Asia Pacific nations excluding Japan, and show that while progress is slow, moves are being made. More than 20% of organisations have moved from ‘ad hoc’ to ‘opportunistic’ over the past two years, yet more than two in five (42.7% and 42.5% respectively) remain there.
Only 10% of organisations are in the next phase, ‘repeatable’, with 4% and 0.7% respectively in the further advanced ‘managed’ and ‘optimised’ brackets. The latter stages are where organisations have their cloud initiatives at an industrial level and, at the highest stage, being able to deliver innovation and transformation.
Yet moving from exploration and collaboration to innovation and transformation requires significant investment in technology, tools, processes and skills, with many of the skills and resources located in large enterprises and IT service providers.
As a result, cloud adoption requires faster time to value and agility. “Speed and agility has become the key drivers for cloud adoption. More organisations in Asia Pacific are adopting a cloud-first strategy such that cloud infrastructure has now become a preferred option for IT modernisation,” said William Lee, IDC Asia/Pacific cloud services research director.
“Organisations need more consistent, standardised, and available automated cloud resources to enable developers and LOB teams to execute at speed and cost,” Lee added. “Workloads portability and application delivery across multiple clouds will be key to build a robust cloud services delivery platform for agility.”
According to the most recent report from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) back in April, Singapore has overtaken Hong Kong as the most cloud-ready Asia Pacific nation. New Zealand, Japan, and Taiwan rounded off the top five.
One nation which continues to struggle in the ACCA analysis, however, is China. Despite IDC saying in February that the country will be the biggest public cloud spender in Asia Pacific aside from Japan, and despite the dominance from Alibaba in the Asia Pacific public cloud market, the country was placed at #13 out of 14 nations. At the time, the report stressed broadband quality and connectivity as its key weaknesses, recognising the difficulty in connecting such a large territory.