Accelerated adoption drives new cloud buying trends across ASEAN, reveals GlobalData

• Organizational-led initiatives, user experience and security top drivers
• ASEAN enterprises looking to align technology with business outcomes
• Service providers need to react swiftly as per the new buying drivers and solution criteria

The accelerated cloud adoption in the last 18 months across the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) region is changing enterprises’ buying behavior and solution criteria when considering new cloud services, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

GlobalData’s report, ‘2021 ASEAN Cloud Buying Trends: Cost and Scalability are No Longer the Top Criteria’, reveals that organizational-led initiatives, user experience and security are now the top three drivers for ASEAN enterprises to consider cloud services, based on an ASEAN enterprise ICT study with 158 decision-makers early this year.

ASEAN was still considered as a cloud laggard not long ago, but the pandemic has driven enterprises to rapidly migrate more workloads to cloud in the last 18 months. 2020 saw several ad-hoc deployments to address the urgent need during lockdowns such as remote working. This year, ASEAN enterprises have become more mature with cloud and are looking for more complex deployments to align the technology with business outcomes.

Alfie Amir, Principal Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “As ASEAN enterprises advance in their cloud journey, they are seeing the technology more as solution to address their business challenges rather than an IT product. The traditional cloud benefits such as cost and scalability are still important but there are other more crucial drivers that map the technology more closely to business priorities.”

Organizational-led initiative is now the top driver for ASEAN enterprises to consider cloud as a key enabler for various initiatives across different business units. This also shows that enterprises are moving from fragmented cloud implementations to more streamlined deployments across organization.

Improving user experience has always been a key driver but has become more important for enterprises to consider cloud. User experience largely relates to the remote working needs, but ASEAN enterprises are also considering more complex approaches such as multi-cloud and network management to further enhance the outcome. While most critical applications remain on-prem, enterprises are moving other workloads to public domains to offload their corporate network and drive scale, performance and improve overall user experience.

The biggest change in ASEAN enterprise cloud buying behavior is security, moving from the top barrier to the third most important driver. This is driven by the increase in threats especially in the last 18 months as well as the advancements of cloud security technologies offered by service providers, such as cloud access security broker and security at the edge. Enterprises are considering cloud as alternative to existing infrastructure, but also to enhance the overall protection of corporate data.

Besides the new cloud buying drivers, there were also shifts in solution criteria. Cloud security, vertical capabilities, managed services and cost management features are now the top areas enterprises are looking for when considering new cloud services.

Mr. Amir concludes: “Service providers need to react fast by aligning their proposition with the new buying drivers and solution criteria. Understanding customers’ cloud strategy is important and everything else such as SD-WAN and security will fall naturally in place. This will offer them an advantage to capture the high growth opportunity and differentiate against other players in the competitive market.”