Malaysia, 18 February 2021 – Before the COVID-19 pandemic, digital transformation has been the main focus for many businesses. In the last few years, many businesses have already embarked on its own digital transformation journeys.
However, implications of the pandemic have accelerated the digital transformation by 5.3 years, according to a study.
Not only did the pandemic sped up the digital adoption, it also caused underlying issues to surface – businesses were found to be not as agile as they have previously thought.
This trying times laid bare deficiencies in businesses’ cloud infrastructure, security and network architecture capabilities, hindering their ability to adapt and remain agile.
Furthermore, the pandemic has forced a cultural mindset shift with global businesses adapting their agility plans from recovering infrastructure and applications to getting office-based workers set up and working from home.
Despite this uncertainty, the pandemic has provided a significant opportunity to accelerate digital transformation initiatives.
The 2021 Hybrid Cloud Report by NTT Ltd report highlights the critical need for business agility, and the role hybrid cloud has had on helping businesses achieve this.
The report based on feedback from 950 decision-makers in 13 countries across five regions – including Singapore, Hong Kong and India – highlighted the increasing reliance on technology.
Based on the report, 90.0% of Asia-Pacific (APAC) businesses agreed that the pandemic has forced businesses to rely on technology more than ever before. In addition, more than half (60.3%) of APAC organisations globally already using, or piloting hybrid cloud while 31.6% of APAC respondents plan to implement a hybrid solution within 12-24 months
“It is clear that hybrid cloud is now seen as critical to data-driven processes and real-time decisions both now and in the future,” NTT pointed out in a statement.
Also, the report found that an improved speed of deployment of apps and services is the biggest driver (38.8%) of hybrid cloud adoption in APAC, especially given the shift to a distributed workforce model where businesses in this region now need to access data and applications in new, different and often complex ways.
According to APAC respondents, the second largest motivation for hybrid cloud adoption is an overall improvement of business agility (38.3%), followed by a more efficient total cost of IT operations (34.0%).
During such an uncertain time, organisations are continuing to tighten their purse strings and look to hybrid cloud to increase cost efficiency and drive its overall performance, says NTT.
Organisations, however, need to implement hybrid cloud in a way that will optimise environments to maximise efficiencies. This is why over half of organisations surveyed (53.6%) strongly agree on the need to engage with experts such as managed cloud providers.
-Focus Malaysia
