A survey of more than 100 global multinational corporations (MNCs) across Asia-Pacific, North America and Europe by Ovum for Cable & Wireless Worldwide reveals that adoption of cloud services is picking up pace among large organisations, with Asia Pacific expressing the greatest interest.
Ovum's findings show 63 per cent of MNCs in Asia-Pacific reporting the uptake of at least one of the cloud services categories; networking, communications, applications, corporate IT systems, as well as data management, security and backup. The research also points to telecoms providers being well positioned to take advantage of cloud services adoption, which is up by 61 percent worldwide from April 2010, with 45 per cent of MNCs already using cloud sourcing for at least some elements of key IT services.
Across the globe, enterprises have already moved significant resources to the cloud and are ready to move more application services. The dominant areas of cloud services uptake are in data backup and storage, at 51 per cent of respondents, with an additional 33 per cent reporting their intention to procure cloud data backup and storage services in the next 24 months.
Cloud uptake is permeating all sectors. Finance and insurance multinationals have adopted cloud services for some elements of corporate IT systems (56 per cent), whereas manufacturing is embracing cloud components for networking and data management (63 per cent and 59 per cent, respectively). Sectors are also placing different applications in cloud environments. Professional services single out Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (50 per cent) while finance and insurance places strong emphasis on document management (50 per cent). Manufacturing places most value on messaging (41 per cent) and CRM (41 per cent).
Charles Kennaway, Vice President of Enterprise Sales, Asia Pacific at C&W Worldwide said, "This research confirms our confidence in the market potential of cloud computing. We are encouraged to see that most enterprises in Asia Pacific have shown such great interest in adopting cloud services. One of the key elements of the research indicates that telecommunication providers are emerging as trusted partners and credible suppliers for cloud services, increasing from 37 per cent in 2010 to 49 per cent in 2011, which is a good indicator for us."
