Cloud matures to be a necessity: VMware

BANGALORE, INDIA: When it comes to cloud and virtualisation, India happens to be the most aggressive country in APAC, second only to Australia, in terms of understanding the technology and embracing it, especially the hybrid variant.

Not just that, the confusion around cloud's definition is decreasing and businesses, and even government for that matter, are today more open to virtualise business critical applications than yesteryears.

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These are the findings of 'Cloud Computing in Asia Pacific: The Annual Cloud Maturity Index', a VMware-commissioned study conducted in association with Forrester Consulting.

"Ninety per cent of large Indian enterprises (companies with employee strength of 10,000 or more) are already using or planning to deploy cloud, compared to 85 per cent in 2010. In comparison, 71 per cent of companies with fewer than 100 employees have or are planning cloud initiatives in 2011, in order to support mobile and flexible workforce," said Andrew Dutton, SVP and GM, Asia Pacific and Japan, VMware.

According to the study, India leads the region in terms of cloud relevance alongside Japan, China, Malaysia and Thailand at 90 per cent. The country’s understanding of cloud computing is also higher than markets such as Singapore and Malaysia.

Sanchit Vir Gogia, senior analyst, Forrester Research India, said: “However, 67 per cent still feel that data privacy/residency, resiliency, loss of control and integration with existing system are key concerns, with factors such as fears of vendor lock-in (61 per cent), loss of control over data (67 per cent) and interoperability issues between different clouds (60 per cent) contributing to overall barriers.”

Fifty per cent of Indian companies have said that they prefer hybrid clouds, especially in the BFSI, telecommunications and healthcare industries.

"Businesses’ willingness to adopt hybrid clouds indicates that they could federate out to public cloud service providers as an extension of their private cloud network, and move essential workloads between public and private clouds, working around data privacy concerns," T. Srinivasan, Managing Director, India and SAARC, VMware.

He also noted that desktop virtualisation is gathering momentum, driven by factors such as security and work-from-home opportunities.

While 58 per cent wants to adopt it for being the cost saver, a majority of them expect cloud-related investments to reduce hardware spending, it also seems as a mode to provision storage- and networking-on-demand activities.

The study also finds that while 78 per cent favour storage in private clouds, only 40 per cent prefer to store their application on public clouds.