90% of Asia-Pacific enterprises now embrace public cloud workloads

According to a recent IDC report titled Asia/Pacific State of Cloud: Adoption Trends, Challenges, and Preferences, almost 90% of Asia/Pacific enterprises now have meaningful workload deployments on multiple public clouds. Most Asia/Pacific organizations have also started embracing true hybrid cloud deployments, and the trend is most noticeable in India, where 85% of respondents indicated that they have one or more workloads deployed in true hybrid cloud setting.

A key finding from the study is that 52% of Asia/Pacific enterprises have deployed at least one edge-to-cloud use case, highlighting a growing comfort in distributed cloud architectures for more complex applications. This data proves that enterprises now view cloud as foundational to their enterprise IT architecture.

“As AI becomes the leading driver of competitive advantage, hybrid cloud architectures are crucial to enterprises balancing digital sovereignty requirements driving the demand for private AI, as well as the proven business value and technological innovation that public clouds offer. Seamless orchestration and management of multiple public cloud and hybrid IT environments, particularly for use cases focused on data, AI, and digital sovereignty, will drive enterprise cloud adoption for the foreseeable future,” says Pushkar Shanbhag, Associate Research Director, Digital Infrastructure and IT Servies, IDC Asia/Pacific.

The study also reveals that enterprises in Asia/Pacific consider a wide diversity of vendor types strategic to their cloud journey — hyperscalers, infrastructure OEMs, specialized cloud professional and managed SPs, business consultants, ISVs/SaaS vendors, colocation providers, telcos, and so forth, in addition to global systems integrators (GSIs). This diversity suggests that enterprises in the region follow many paths to and strategies for cloud adoption, usage, and scaling.

“As part of their digital infrastructure and cloud services sourcing strategy, it is crucial for enterprises to carefully assess the breadth and depth of vendors’ ecosystem capabilities. Partnerships, technical delivery, joint R&D initiatives, codeveloped/cobranded solutions, etc., in addition to a vendors’ own unique IP and assets, will ensure the of orchestration of value across an increasingly complex ecosystem,” ends Shanbhag.

Finally, IDC finds that enterprises’ most common challenges in their cloud journey can be distilled down to an inability to realize expected value and result incost overruns, suboptimal performance, operational economics, schedule slippages, multivendor management issues, and so forth. The report highlights and explores significant variations and nuanced observations across different Asia/Pacific sub-regions, industries and even by respondent profiles. IDC