IDC Survey Reveals Increased Awareness of the Rapidly Maturing Cloud Services Market among Asia/Pacific CIOs in the past 12 Months
Singapore, 6 September, 2010 – CIOs have been inundated with a barrage of information about the cloud in the last 12 months. Today, they are better informed about this fast moving market and have become more ready to start making commitments in the cloud space, according to IDC’s Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) or APEJ Cloud Computing end user survey 2010.
The APEJ cloud services market has rapidly matured in the last year, with higher awareness of both the pros and cons of the public and private cloud delivery models. But along with this better understanding, there remain concerns about the potential weaknesses of the cloud delivery models — security and availability. In this context, informed and pragmatic decisions are being made about which applications are best suited to a cloud delivery model, and whether that application should be sourced from the public cloud, or whether implementing the application in a private cloud is the best solution.
Chris Morris, IDC’s Asia/Pacific Research Director of Asia/Pacific IT Services Research says, “The recent uncertain economic conditions have accelerated interest in cloud delivery models because of their ability to deliver IT and business services at a much lower capital outlay. This is the key factor in which cloud services are now being evaluated.”
IDC has seen a rapid maturation of users’ understanding of cloud services and cloud computing in 2010. Chris adds, “Rather than ‘The Cloud’ being viewed as a collection of new technologies, savvy CIOs now see ‘The Cloud’ as being an extension of their sourcing strategies.” Today, CIOs are adding both the public and private cloud delivery models to their services sourcing portfolio, just as they have added outsourced and managed services in the past. They are also applying the same selectivity to the cloud as they do to other externally sourced services.
Now that CIOs have the answers to some of their initial concerns surrounding the use of “The Cloud”, they want to be informed enough to be able to ask the smart questions about their potential cloud vendors to ensure that they are making the best strategic decisions. “This is a very important stage of the development of the cloud market,” says Chris.
Though the ability of cloud services to deliver IT cost savings continues to remain the top benefit identified by the respondents, other factors, especially in the mature markets, are also rated highly. Workload is one of the most apparent determinants when choosing a delivery model.
Enterprises remain most concerned about security, performance and control of data when considering cloud adoption. Results from IDC’s APEJ Cloud Computing end user survey 2010 show that users in Singapore are planning to place significant parts of their workload into private cloud environments instead of public cloud environments. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1
The adoption of private cloud is a less risky way to gain some of the benefits of cloud computing without exposure to the downsides. These private clouds may be implemented within the datacenters of enterprises. IDC also finds that many users, when faced with technologies which they have limited experience in, are considering external located private clouds, or “virtual private clouds” as some telco service providers are calling them. These virtual private clouds provide a very attractive, fast-track option for many organizations and will figure prominently in the next three years.
About IDC’s Asia/Pacific Cloud Computing Conference 2010 In 2010, IDC’s Asia/Pacific Cloud Computing Conference will be held for the second consecutive year across 10 cities in Asia/Pacific. The global financial crisis has contributed to the acceleration of interest in cloud computing as the cloud model promises a much cheaper way for businesses to acquire and use IT. Over the next five years, IDC forecasts that Asia/Pacific spending on IT cloud services will grow fourfold, reaching US$4.6 billion by 2014. Spending on cloud computing will accelerate throughout the forecast period, with a forecasted CAGR of more than 40% across the region from 2010 – 2014. IDC believes that the rapid emergence of cloud services, and the cloud computing model underpinning these services, are ushering in a fundamentally new era of growth and competition in the IT market. For more information about the conference, visit http://www.idc.com.sg/CloudComputing2010.
For more information, contact:
Chris Morris
cmorris@idc.com
+61-2-9925-2208
Lay Fang Tan
lftan@idc.com
+65-6829-7731
