Hybrid Cloud: The New Standard for Delivery of Digital Transformation

IDC Asia/Pacific has announced its top 10 predictions for cloud services and highlights how adoption of cloud is continuously evolving in the region – becoming the core enabler of the Digital Transformation of Asia Pacific businesses.

“In fact, 2016 will be a big year for solutions built on hybrid cloud architectures with 65% of Asia Pacific enterprises to commit for its implementation”, said Chris Morris, vice president, Cloud and Services, IDC Asia/Pacific.

IDC believes that the big drivers for increased implementation of hybrid clouds are IT’s continuing quest for optimized infrastructure, and the ability of solution builders to source application and infrastructure components from multiple providers to construct a hybrid cloud-based solution.

Furthermore, IDC predicts that by the end of 2018, 40% of IT spend across hardware, software and services will be for cloud oriented technologies, and by 2020, 45%-50% of all spend will be for cloud delivered models.

“With increasing cloud spending, many enterprises will have begun use of hybrid solutions without IT’s direct involvement. With the business unit managers increasingly buying their own cloud solutions, hybrid cloud architectures can proliferate, and sometimes not be aligned with the enterprise architecture”, added Morris.

With key shifts in cloud delivery models, the rest of the predictions for cloud are the following:

#2: Industry Cloud. By 2019, industry cloud creation will be viewed as the top market entry strategy for both technology providers and industrial companies alike, as IT leaders’ industry domain experts join to tear down traditional barriers to entry.

#4: Workload-Centric Management. By 2017, 50% of enterprise IT organizations building hybrid clouds will purchase new or updated workload-centric cloud management solutions.

#5: Public Data & Analytics. By 2018, cloud becomes a preferred delivery mechanism for public data, information, and analytics, increasing public information consumption by 150% and paving the way for thousands of new industry applications.

#6: Diversified IT. By 2020, 60% of companies’ IT assets are off-site in colocation, hosting, and cloud datacenters while ¼ of IT “staff” are employees of third-party service providers.

#7 Open Becomes Mandatory Cloud Evaluation Criteria. By 2017, over 60% of enterprises will embrace open source and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as the underpinning for cloud integration strategies.

#8 DevOps Matures. By 2018, over 60% of new apps will use cloud-enabled continuous delivery and cloud-native application architectures to enable faster innovation and business agility.

#9 Skills and Staffing. By 2017, there will be a 15% shift of IT budget away from traditional in-house IT delivery as organizations use more 3rd party service providers to fill cloud-related skills gaps.

#10 East-West. By 2018, 25% of global enterprises will have service providers from Asia/Pacific as part of their cloud ecosystem.

”As the use of cloud services matures and broadens, the emphasis for enterprise IT has moved from technology management to service management and the optimization of workloads. The impact of digital transformation projects on the service delivery infrastructure necessitates that CIOs re-architect their delivery processes to ensure the IT environment is flexible and agile, yet secure and resilient”, said Mayur Sahni, senior research manager for Cloud and Service, IDC Asia/Pacific.

In closing, IDC predicts that the impact for Asian players on cloud is quite significant with at least 25% of all cloud players within an enterprise environment originating from Asia.

To share more information about IDC’s Cloud FutureScapes document and implications for the Asian market, IDC Asia/Pacific is hosting a free webcast titled ” Hybrid Cloud: Mastering the Raw Material of Digital Transformation” on January 20, 2016; to be led by IDC Vice President, Chris Morris and Mayur Sahni, Senior Research Manager for Cloud and Services