The IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2021 Predictions — Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) acknowledges that cloud and cloud-centric operating models have grown to become integral components of the modern IT environment.
Trial by fire
With the COVID-19 pandemic being the first crisis of the cloud era, all cloud promises – elastic consumption, agile development, and global reach – are being put to the test.
“Cloud provides benefits such as flexibility, agility, reach and scalability; both in terms of being able to scale out quickly and scale down have become even more strategic and important to enterprises to adapt to changing business needs as we move forward towards a new normal under these pandemic impacted times,” says Daphne Chung, research director for Cloud Services and Software research at IDC Asia/Pacific.
Benefits under test
Cloud's benefits have made the technology the most strategic and widely adopted technology amid the pandemic. From leveraging SaaS solutions that cover collaboration, productivity, and security point solutions, cloud solutions and services have been adopted to support remote working and innovation initiatives.
IDC believes cloud platforms (public/hosted/private and recently introduced LCaaS compute, storage, and network bundles from IT suppliers) are also playing critical roles in helping enterprises react to the crisis, deal with the slowdown, and enable operational resiliency.
"Organizations of all sizes now see cloud as a critical component of their forward-looking IT strategy. IDC expects that early adopters of cloud and other digital technologies are best positioned to ride out this kind of storm with the least amount of disruption from an operational perspective," says Chris Morris, vice president for Cloud & Partner Ecosystems research at IDC Asia/Pacific.
IDC predictions
Through 2022, all enterprises will struggle with application modernization and data integration throughout cloud silos. Around 20% will adopt well-connected cloud strategies to overcome these concerns.
Chung said that in 2022, enterprise cloud architects in APEJ will truly begin to grasp that their organizations' operational complexity has grown significantly and is now reaching a breaking point. She acknowledged that while APEJ will lag in adopting new technologies to address this complexity, IT operations (ITOps), DevOps, and cloud operations (CloudOps) teams will find themselves struggling to maintain service levels, manage costs, and ensure security and compliance throughout loosely coupled hybrid and multicloud architectures, traditional systems, and services developed at the edge.
“The region's heterogenous geographic spread across multiple countries will also add to the complexity.”
By 2023, enterprises will have allocated 20% of new cloud services spending to cloud solutions that meet specific industry and ecosystem data-sharing requirements for their vertical segment.
Globally, businesses have realized the benefits of their industry's common practices and streamlined their resources to meet regulatory requirements, customer experience (CX) goals, and competitive differentiators.
Chung said demand in highly regulated industries, such as the financial services, healthcare, and government sectors, will drive the new wave of industry cloud solutions.
“However, APEJ is a diverse region with differentiated requirements and practices throughout similar vertical industry segments in different geographies. This will delay the adoption of broad industry cloud solutions here.”
By 2024, over a quarter of new workloads deployed on public clouds will have used purpose-built silicon and infrastructure components from providers to optimize use case-specific requirements.
She noted that hyperscalers have become key innovators in technologies that, traditionally, have not been their core domains, such as datacentres and infrastructure.
Traditional datacentre providers and IT manufacturers/vendors often now compete or partner with hyperscalers in these technologies.
“Some areas that cloud providers have innovated and developed internal capabilities include silicon, infrastructure and software to deliver their cloud service. More public cloud offerings are now built and delivered using proprietary capabilities the cloud providers themselves developed.”
