Asia Pacific region businesses increasingly embrace the cloud

Chief information offices across the Asia Pacific region (excluding Japan) are planning to increase their budgets for cloud computing services by 50% to a combined total of $US7.5 billion during 2013, according to an IDC survey.

In total, 39% of respondents indicated that their spending on cloud computing would be between 5% and 30% of their total IT budget, with a further 7% said their spending would be between 30% and 40% of their budget.

While 22% of CIOs expect to not spend any of their IT budget to be spent on the cloud in 2013, the number expecting this to still be the case in 2015 is just 1%.

“This shift to cloud services is not uniform. We have variations by country as well as by deployment. China’s spending intentions are clearly for on-premises private cloud investments, while Singapore and Australia will spread spending across public, private and hosted cloud services, delivering a hybrid cloud environment by 2015,” says Chris Morris from IDC.

“With the number of hosted private cloud solutions now available from providers that have strong IT service management processes, demand for these offerings is set to grow at rates faster than other cloud segments.

“It is also apparent from the survey that CIOs now recognize that a cloud solution is not just OPEX– significant up-front project costs are being reported. Typically, these are 10-20% of the total cloud project costs.”

Earlier this week, SmartCompany reported Microsoft announced new datacentres in Australia as part of an expansion of its Windows Azure cloud hosting services, in anticipation of future growth.

“The new Windows Azure major region in Australia will consist of two sub-regions located in New South Wales and Victoria. These two locations will be geo-redundant, offering our customers the ability to back up their data across two separate locations, both within Australia,” Microsoft server and tools business group lead Toby Bowers said.