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Covid-19 has accelerated customer demand for digital technologies to ensure resilient enterprise business operations across Asia Pacific, resulting in cloud-based offerings outshining traditional products.
Key verticals like banking and financial, healthcare and manufacturing sectors are witnessing a surge in demand for cloud-based solutions, owing to features like remote data storage capabilities and provisioning of privileges for hosted applications.
This crisis has derailed the economy of Asian countries to a certain extent. Governments in these countries, therefore, are encouraging the adoption of advanced digital capabilities amongst small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises.
For example, the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) has introduced GoCloud to support SMEs when migrating from legacy software development procedures and architectures to cloud-based applications delivered as cloud native applications or services. This will help businesses to perform effectively during the pandemic, in addition to supporting the economy of the country.
Cloud service providers are also witnessing a surge in the adoption of cloud-based communication and collaboration tools through a rise in audio conference calls, video collaboration solutions and virtual schooling.
During the pandemic, the majority of organisations are providing a work from home facility to employees in countries such India, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand.
Cloud-based offerings like Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams are increasingly being used for office collaboration within businesses, alongside an increase in remote education and training at educational institution levels.
Furthermore, public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Salesforce are providing products as-a-service to empower companies with increased computation and storage capabilities at a relatively low investment.
For instance, Nutanix announced an enhanced free trial of its Frame Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for enterprises in the region in February to enable remote working for enterprises amidst the Covid-19 outbreak.
Additionally, vendors indirectly associated with cloud services are also witnessing increased product demand. Leading graphics processing units (GPUs) providers like Inphi and Nvidia are providing products critical for moving large amounts of digital information quickly between and within data centres.
In May, Nvidia launched its first Ampere chips designed for cloud servers and high-performance computers. Nvidia stated that leading cloud-computing providers located in the US and China are planning to incorporate A100 chips. Some of these leading cloud computing providers include AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba Group, Baidu and Tencent.
However, increased cloud adoption, in turn, has increased the potential cyber security threats at the user end, owing to the lack of robust security configurations, most prominently in instances like remote working by a majority of the people.
To mitigate these threats, cloud vendors are providing various solutions for data security via virtual private network (VPN) connection, secure and encrypted network aided with robust authentication factors for hustle-free communication.
There is a high demand for software-as-a-service (SaaS) based offerings from enterprises, specifically for teleworking and remote conferencing. Low staff presence to monitor local servers or data centres has compelled them to opt for public cloud offerings.
The benefits of cloud services align directly with broader enterprise strategies like new product and services developments, resulting in the creation of new revenue streams and adopt an agile transformation model to align their operations as per changing business requirements.
Anshuma Singh is a technology analyst at GlobalData
