Barriers to Cloud Adoption

Just over a third of organisations in the countries surveyed are happy with the security delivered by public cloud providers. Yet the majority (62%) are dictated by strict data protection requirements which demand that data and applications are hosted within private, on-premise clouds.premise hosting.

Hybrid Cloud Benefits

The benefits associated with hybrid cloud are widely recognised. Over three quarters rate the ability to accommodate performance, availability and reliability requirements and provide greater resource control as advantages alongside service cost optimisation through greater use of public clouds.

Open Source Cloud Platforms

Ease of use for staff configuring and provisioning cloud services are also valued highly by large numbers of organisations, as is the ability to integrate cloud virtualisation platforms with other systems in on- and off-premise hosting.

Asia is judged a hot bed of demand for cloud services due to the nature of its emerging economies. Local markets see a high complement of start-ups and smaller businesses, both of which are unencumbered by legacy in-house IT architecture. These firms are also naturally inclined to opt for on-demand cloud usage models which minimise spending capital expenditure and shifting equipment costs into monthly service fees.

Some territories, including China, Indonesia and Singapore have also seen strong support for cloud transition initiatives from central government coupled with a high level of investment in cloud hosting data centre facilities from global multinationals such as IBM, HP, Google and Microsoft.

The survey gauged their appetite for moving more applications and services into cloud hosted environments over the next two years and assessed attitudes to open source cloud/virtualisation platforms such as OpenStack. It also gathered opinion on whether closer integration of local and remote hosted systems management, orchestration and virtualisation tools could deliver operational advantage for cloud hosted service provision.

Those taking part were equally split across Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. The majority (59%) worked for organisations employing between 100 and 1,000 people, with 32 percent reporting staff headcounts of between 1,000 and 10,000 and 9 percent over 10,000.

The research found that organisations across Asia and Australia today rely on a mixture of different cloud platforms and will continue to do so in the future despite subtle changes in usage patterns across all nine countries being expected.

Over half (58%) on aggregate currently use off-premise, public cloud services, leased and provisioned with approval of the resident IT department (examples include those delivered by Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, HPE and Microsoft) and this is unlikely to change between now and 2018.

Around a third will also continue to use off-premise, public cloud services which have not been approved by their organisation. This may present the resident IT department with something of a headache when it comes to tracking and monitoring usage, and controlling the costs associated with those services.

As usage of on-premise private clouds falls slightly, organisations will come to rely more on hybrid clouds that mix different elements of on- and off-premise private clouds and public clouds within a single platform or service. This number will grow from just over a quarter today (27%) to 41 percent in two years’ time.

This transition provides a strong indication that in many cases it is more of the virtualised applications and workloads which currently reside in on-premise private clouds specifically which will be incorporated into hybrid clouds in the future.

It is important to note that static or declining use of on-premise private cloud solutions as organisations move more workloads onto hybrid platforms may not tell the whole story. The volume of the virtualised applications and services kept in on-premise private clouds could actually be higher. The RightScale report found that 13 percent of enterprises ran more than 1,000 virtual machines in public clouds in 2014 for example, but more - 22 percent - ran the same number in some form of private cloud.

Nor does the suggestion that the use of on-premise private cloud solutions will fall necessarily mean that existing private cloud platforms will be scrapped. In many cases they will be integrated in hybrid cloud platforms that span both private and public cloud architecture as long as they can be effectively combined using suitable hybrid cloud management systems.

Those in Australia and Singapore make more use of on-premise, private clouds currently, but that usage is set to fall in Australia whilst remaining static in Singapore. Companies in India specifically expect to see the most significant growth in their use of hybrid clouds, anticipated to rise from 28 percent today to 69 percent in 2018.

* ‘2015 State of the Cloud Report’, RightScale, February 2015

** ‘Global Business Technographics Infrastructure Survey’, Forrester, August 2015

Security remains the most important objective for organisations implementing any type of public, private or hybrid cloud solution. Most, if not all, IT departments remain keen to ensure the safety and integrity of data stored in both on- and off-premise cloud application and service hosting environments.

Different countries attribute varying levels of priority to security and governance however. The IDG Connect findings suggest respondents in Indonesia (25), Australia (24) and Singapore (24) rate this as a slightly more important objective than their colleagues in the other territories surveyed.

Nor is improving security and governance the only aim for cloud implementations: other ambitions are apparent and ascribed roughly equal levels of importance.

The ability to scale IT capacity up or down to meet fluctuating or temporary business requirements – typically server, CPU and RAM resources packaged within infrastructure as a service (IaaS) workloads - is rated almost as highly. The same is true for cost transparency in being able to accurately predict the fees associated with individual IT projects and services for budget forecasting and departmental chargeback purposes.

Organisations consider access to cloud platforms from multiple client devices (including laptops, smartphones and tablets for example) as equally important. This suggests that many of the organisations polled are catering for a mobile workforce that needs to stay connected to centralised applications and services from wherever they happen to be, irrespective of the device they are using.

There is strong evidence to suggest that there is significant headroom for more enterprise workloads to be moved into the cloud. RightScale* estimates that 68 percent of organisations globally currently run less than 20 percent of their applications on some form of cloud platform. Just over half (55%) of the IT decision makers RightScale surveyed reported that a significant portion of their employers’ application portfolio was not hosted in the cloud despite them being cloud ready.

There still appear to be major barriers which may be preventing organisations in Asia and Australia from moving more of those workloads into the cloud. In addition to being an objective for their cloud implementations, we see that providing adequate data security and complying with any government or industry data protection regulation is also their biggest source of apprehension.

applications and services is the second most widely perceived obstacle to cloud migration. Almost the same number of organisations (62%) believe the complexity associated with integrating their existing on-premise IT infrastructure with cloud platforms will stop them from making the move. This is a firm indication that many of the organisations polled currently, and will continue to, use multiple on- and off-premise public and private cloud services that will need to be supported by effective hybrid cloud management solutions if those doubts are to be addressed.

Roughly one in two organisations across all nine countries surveyed by IDG Connect doubt they will be able to negotiate customised service level agreements (SLAs) with single or multiple cloud service providers to match their specific business requirements.

The anticipated shift to hybrid cloud deployments that span both on- and off-premise private and public cloud service platforms brings its own challenges, many of which are identified in the Infographic Summary.

Those taking part in the IDG Connect survey appreciate that greater integration of virtualisation platforms and systems management and orchestration tools can go some way to addressing those concerns, however.

Just over a quarter felt this was a strategy which could enhance their current data security and compliance operations by helping control and manage governance policies. For example, this includes tighter integration and improved security controls by streamlining identity verification processes and resource access permissions.

By delivering all three advantages, that integration could then provide a foundation for more applications and services currently hosted in legacy infrastructure to be moved into cloud orientated platforms in the future.

Organisations currently use a broad mix of virtualisation and systems management tools as the basis for their private cloud platforms, but the level of integration they support between each other and public cloud platforms varies considerably. RightScale** identified VMware’s vSphere/vCenter as the most widely used private cloud platform in 2015, ahead of VMware’s Cloud Suite, OpenStack, Microsoft System Center, Citrix CloudStack and Microsoft Azure Pack. However, use of both OpenStack and Microsoft Azure Pack was expected to increase at a faster rate than any other platform in the future.

Better data security and compliance provision is widely seen as a benefit associated with private cloud implementations that run applications and services either within the organisation’s own on-premise data centre, or in dedicated, single tenanted server and storage platforms hosted remotely within third party facilities.

Over two thirds (69 percent) of the organisations polled by IDG Connect also consider this type of cloud architecture well placed to accommodate specific application and/or service performance, availability and reliability requirements. This could in part be due to a perception that localised workloads - or those protected by virtual private network (VPNs) and service level agreement (SLA) guarantees - are less likely to be disrupted by wide area network (WAN) latency or downtime issues.

and user, track usage, and allocate costs for billing and chargeback purposes.

Forrester* also found enterprise interest in private cloud deployments to be consistent. It estimated that 67 percent of organisations consider building private clouds to be a high priority, and 43 percent had adopted them already (up from 38 percent a year earlier). Almost a quarter of those built their private clouds using either a series of private cloud software solutions or commercial private cloud software, with 13 percent favouring converged hardware/software solutions and 12 percent open source platforms.

The IDG Connect survey found that when based on a single, rather than multi-vendor, infrastructure platform, private clouds are also thought to simplify support, management, maintenance and configuration requirements.

to come, meaning an evolution of existing assets alongside pockets of newly created cloud resources is necessary. IDG Connect’s findings reinforce this theory, with just over half of those polled (53%) associating the ability to take the strain off legacy, in-house infrastructure as a benefit of private cloud.

*‘The Forrester Wave: Private Cloud Software Suites’, Forrester, March 2016.

**’Preparing for Private and Hybrid IT with Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure’, IDC, February 2015

The benefits of private clouds are also strongly associated with hybrid clouds that run some applications and services in private on-premise clouds, and others in public clouds.

This is logical given that the latter utilises elements of those same private cloud platforms to a certain extent.

We see that 75 percent of respondents surveyed by IDG Connect in Asia and Australia consider the alleviation of data security and compliance concerns as a significant or major benefit of hybrid clouds.

Slightly more on aggregate (79%) saw the ability to accommodate specific application and service requirements around performance, availability and reliability requirements as an advantage, again alongside greater control over available cloud hosted resources.

Despite their comparatively low use of hybrid clouds today, or intentions to migrate to hybrid cloud platforms in the future, more organisations in Japan and Korea rate the advantages of hybrid clouds greater than in any other territory.

While the benefits of hybrid clouds are widely recognised, respondents also identify major barriers which they feel may prevent their organisations from implementing this type of cloud platform.

Chief amongst these is the initial cost of integrating legacy on-premise infrastructure and applications and/or private clouds with off-premise private or public cloud architecture. Many (28%) of those polled also think that integration will lead to greater service and application management overheads with both cost and staff resource implications of their own. The same number (28%) are wary of having to negotiate multiple SLAs with different cloud service providers should those hybrid platforms be used to combine privately hosted clouds with public cloud services such as those provided by AWS, Google, IBM (Softlayer), Microsoft, and others.

organisation’s ability to switch cloud providers to optimise costs where required.

The perceived barriers to cloud adoption are not limited solely to the practical. A quarter of those surveyed on aggregate felt that the absence of in-house skills in hybrid cloud operations and management could prove insurmountable, and a similar number doubt support for hybrid cloud deployment initiatives at management or boardroom level (barriers felt more keenly by organisations in Japan and Korea specifically).

OpenStack is an established open source software platform which is used as the foundation for many different private, public and hybrid cloud computing services. It is therefore no surprise to find that OpenStack has been widely implemented by organisations across all nine countries surveyed by IDG Connect. Only two percent of those polled on aggregate do not use OpenStack at all, and that number increases only slightly to eight percent in Hong Kong and Malaysia specifically.

OpenStack is used as the basis for almost all types of cloud services - including on- and off-premise private, off-premise public and hybrid clouds - in roughly one out of every two organisations within the region. It also underpins a diverse range of virtualised workloads and services, most notably infrastructure as a service (IaaS) applications in 57 percent of cases and database as a service propositions in 56 percent.

scheduled backup and disaster recovery operations; planned ad hoc testing and development projects (PaaS); seasonal web applications and online hosting demands. These findings also indicate that OpenStack is regularly used to support workloads which are widely deemed as mission-critical.

Forrester* evaluated 11 commercial hybrid cloud management platforms, some of which – including those from CliQr Technologies, Dell, IBM, Red Hat, RightScale and Scalr - use OpenStack as their foundation. The same is true for private cloud platforms, with Forrester also highlighting OpenStack based applications from HPE, IBM and Red Hat as leaders alongside non-OpenStack alternatives from VMware.

*‘The Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions’ Forrester, March 2016

With so many organisations in Asia and Australia already using OpenStack clouds, they are well placed to judge the benefits that open source cloud/virtualisation platforms deliver.

For example, over two thirds (69%) consider strong interoperability and application programming interfaces (APIs) to be one advantage. This again mirrors Forrester’s findings*, which concluded that the use of fully published representational state transfer (REST) based APIs that link to public cloud platforms offer significant advantages alongside element management and monitoring tools.

Those advantages include improved productivity for in-house developers compared to working through web graphical user interfaces (GUIs), allowing the administration team to build out integrations not already available from the cloud providers in question.

external developers and third party software companies.

Cost is again a consideration. Over half (56%) rated a billing model that shifts expenditure away from software license fees and into annual support and maintenance charges as important. Roughly the same number (58%) also saw low software acquisition costs as a positive trait, one that holds a strong attraction for a significant percentage (14%), citing this as the single most important benefit of all.

*‘Forrester Wave: Private Cloud Software Suites’, Forrester, March 2016 report

The two attributes that most organisations in Asia and Australia value in open source cloud virtualisation platforms based on software tools such as OpenStack are stability and performance.

Clearly, their top priority is to make sure that the cloud hosted applications and services they deliver to end users are always available and remain unhampered by latency, slow access speeds, infrastructure downtime or other issues.

Ease of use for IT staff configuring and operating those virtualisation platforms is also highly rated by 70 percent. This suggests they would prefer to minimise the overhead involved in managing cloud hosted applications and services wherever possible, and would welcome cloud management platforms which provide automated provisioning, allocation and migration controls.

This may suggest equal numbers of organisations would prefer to run open source cloud and virtualisation platforms as a pervasive architectural solution - and perhaps as a single vendor system - and do not intend it to be integrated, or to communicate, with other platforms within their chosen cloud service delivery environments.

The results of the IDG Connect survey demonstrate that organisations across Asia and Australia currently rely on multiple different cloud platforms for IT service delivery and will continue to do so in the future. Yet the next two years will see more integration of private and public cloud services into hybrid environments which span both.

Improving security and governance is the top priority for those cloud implementations as data protection concerns continue to dominate. Both private and hybrid cloud implementations are considered well placed to address those data security and compliance concerns. Other advantages are widely recognised. Having greater control of the data and applications stored in cloud environments is seen as a particular asset alongside the ability to meet specific application and service workload performance, availability and reliability requirements.

their existing security frameworks and aid compliance with corporate, government and industry regulation.

The OpenStack software platform is already widely used as the basis for public, private and hybrid cloud implementations, supporting a variety of IaaS, PaaS, DaaS and backup and disaster recovery workloads. As an open source platform, access to the underlying source code, low software acquisition costs and a billing model that shifts fees into annual support and maintenance charges were identified as benefits by more than half of the organisations taking part in the IDG Connect survey. But the big convenience of open source cloud/virtualisation platforms is seen as strong interoperability and APIs which allow in-house developers to build their own links to public clouds and utilise third party solutions for application and service configuration.