Demand for hybrid deployments heighten as business buys into cloud

Enterprise applications are increasingly being moved into the cloud as organisations embrace the “cloud-first” philosophy.

Based on F5 Networks data from 3,200 IT decisions makers across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, The State of Application Delivery in APAC 2015, the findings detail their current and planned use of application services.

Findings further reveal that the use of applications by APAC companies is growing and shows no sign of abating.

Amongst those surveyed, almost half (45 percent) currently deploy between 1-200 applications, while almost 10 per cent of organisations currently deploy more than 3,000 applications.

The study also showed that at least 41 percent of IT decision makers are open to moving up to a quarter (24 percent) of their applications to the cloud by 2016, while almost 24 percent are keen to move between 25 to 50 percent.

“As applications continue to be a critical part of the business strategy, organisations are seeking the same confidence level in cloud deployments that they’ve seen in the data centre,” says Emmanuel Bonnassie, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific, F5 Networks.

“Companies in every industry rely on applications to drive customer engagement, employee productivity and revenue today.

“In fact, our research revealed that mobile applications and big data analytics are considered more important trends than the Internet of Things.

“These findings suggest a growing hybrid environment across the region, with a mix of on premise and off premises solutions increasingly being adopted by enterprises.”

Obstacles for hybrid cloud adoption

Despite the growing popularity of hybrid clouds, 29 percent of organisations attributed slow adoption to the failure to identify a comprehensive identity and access management policy.

Furthermore, another 35 percent also admitted to the lack of internal knowledge of the scope of cloud usage as an impediment to adoption.

App security is top priority

Additional survey results reveal that security is top priority for APAC organisations, outranking the importance of availability and performance when it comes to applications.

In fact, 42 percent of survey respondents believe that application services cannot be deployed without security.

Yet worryingly, a further quarter had no plans to deploy DDoS protection, suggesting that many organisations in the APAC region still fail to view various types of attack as a significant threat to their business.