Cloud deployment trends in APAC: IDC

Enterprises should start thinking what needs to get into their respective clouds. Transformative IT is unhinging the rules. There will be a cloud-based convergence era in the future, according to Avneesh Saxena, Group VP, Domain Research Group, IDC Asia/Pacific. He was presenting on cloud deployment trends in the Asia Pacific region at the recently held Intel APAC Cloud Summit.

According to him, China and India - with 9 percent each - led the countries in GPD and change agents. He referred to four mega trends:

* Information - exploding data. Just under 50 percent of TB shipped in 2014 will be in the public cloud.
* Mobility - third platform for industry growth. Mobile devices, services and applications will grow from 2011. This will be the intelligent economy.
* The technology catalyst. Servers, blades, cores, VMs, data transmission, 10G ports -- all will grow, some, by at least 5-10 times.
* IT spending (external spend only) will be worth $282 billion in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ). Also, 31 percent of CIOs and 25 percent of LoBs (line of business) plan to spend 11-30 percent more.

The top three priorities for CIOs and LoBs are as follows:
* Simplify the IT infrastructure.
* Lower the overall cost structure.
* Harnessing IT for competitive edge.

We will be investing more in mobility and analytics. There will be a move toward consolidation, virtualization and better efficiency. There will be a move toward a more flexible, agile and scalable infrastructure, as well, in the future.

Saxena outlined three key transformational trends.
Behavior/access -- mobility/analytics.
Infrastructure/devices -- convergence, virtualization.
Delivery/consumption -- cloud.

Mobilution is a confluence of factors. It is mobile everything. A lot of the distribution channels aer also cloud driven. Analytics-led competitive acceleration is the primary objective of business analytics projects.

Saxena added that there could yet be another disruption -- in the form of micro servers. The idea is to lower the cost of computing per unit of work. Even Intel's infrastructure will get 75 percent virtualized in three to four years from now.

There will also be converged infrastructure for private clouds. Besides, server virtualization is ramping up fast. There will be a huge increase in server shipments by 2014.

Next, there will be device proliferation impact on client virtualization. There is a demand to connect all of our devices -- smartphones, iPads, BlackBerrys, tablets, etc.

Evolving cloud business models include, C2C. The consumer clouds are the most popular, such as Hotmail, Gmail, Google Docs, etc. B2C clouds are the next -- such as NetFlix, Apple, Skype, etc. Finally, there are B2B clouds -- enterprise clouds -- where security, SLAs are differentiators.

Security/regulation are critical for public clouds. As of now, private clouds are deemed to be more secure than public clouds. Solving cloud security and compliance is a huge revenue opportunity for vendors.