by NUR HAZIQAH A MALEK / pic by TMR FIL

MORE than half of Malaysians surveyed in a recent report on cloud computing said they have invested in private cloud as digital solutions become increasingly sought after in workplaces amid the pandemic.

Nutanix Malaysia country manager Avinash Gowda said the global pandemic has raised IT’s profile and accelerated cloud adoption locally.

“Covid-19 has significantly accelerated digital transformation across industries, and as part of the transformation, organisations are increasingly turning to cloud technology to manage workloads,” he said at the media briefing on Nutanix’s third annual Enterprise Cloud Index report.

The report found 58% of Malaysians raised their investment in private cloud, outpacing the global average of 37% and 44% in Asia-Pacific countries.

Remote working options have also led to respondents strengthening their public cloud infrastructure to quickly accommodate for their working needs, with 67% of Malaysian respondents saying they have boosted public cloud usage, while another 51% said they have increased hybrid cloud usage.

Cloud computing is broadly defined as the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without a direct active management or hosting by the user.

Gowda said while Malaysians are slightly behind the curve with private cloud adoption, IT professionals report above average progress with hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).

“59% of respondents said they’ve deployed HCI or are in the process of deploying it in their data centres compared to 50% of global respondents.

“The relevance of HCI is it creates a foundation for private cloud by virtualising and integrating data centre compute, storage and networking devices in standard, off-the-shelf server hardware,” he said.

For Malaysia, respondents are bullish about expanding their public multi-cloud environments with usage expected to grow by 6% in the next five years.

“In the next year, they expect to increase their use of two public clouds from 25% to 39% and their use of three public clouds from 13% to 22%.

“However, they expect their use of more than three public cloud services to remain static at just 5% during that time,” he said.

Meanwhile, 74% of respondents said the motive for modernising the company’s IT infrastructures is to increase flexibility to meet business needs.

“From increasing flexibility to meet business needs, three goals tie for the second place as inspiring change, with 63% of respondents from Malaysia selecting each of the following factors.

“This is to gain better control of IT resource usage, followed by increasing the speed of meeting business needs and better supporting customers,” he said.

The findings found that only 29% Malaysians cite cost savings as a motive.

The report also found that IT deployment decisions in Malaysia were influenced by security, privacy and compliance triumvirate.

Other factors included budget availability for capital expenditure.

Nearly all respondents from Malaysia (96%) identified hybrid cloud as the most ideal IT operating model, outpacing those in the Asia-Pacific region (90%) and the global response pool (87%).

“Malaysian respondents run slightly more hybrid clouds than average today, with 14% penetration which they intend to grow to 57% penetration in five years,” he said.

The pandemic has also fuelled changes in companies’ priorities, with Malaysian respondents citing implementing 5G networks (62%) and adoption of hybrid cloud infrastructure (61%).

According to Gowda, respondents in Malaysia will be seeing growth only in hybrid cloud and public multi-cloud infrastructures five years from now as other IT environments are absorbed into the former model.