Enterprise apps next in line for hybrid cloud deployment: HDS

Hybrid clouds will emerge as the preferred approach for deploying enterprise applications, according to predictions made by Hitachi Data Systems.

As part of the release of its business and technology predictions for Asia-Pacific in 2015, the company believes that cloud platforms have reached a level of maturity. It predicts that organisations will begin to transform their core legacy applications to leverage a mix of private and public clouds, in order to achieve better cost alignment while meeting privacy and compliance requirements.

Adrian De Luca, HDS Asia-Pacific chief technology officer, said CIOs are now at the forefront of taking the initiative to move enterprise and mission-critical applications onto private clouds, and at the same time experiment with public cloud for internal workloads and customer-facing web applications.

"They're looking at workloads to see what the costs are of redeveloping an application, because if the cost of redeveloping an application, which can be well in excess, in some cases, than buying infrastructure, their preference is to keep that on-premise and on a legacy architecture," he said.

"But what they are looking for are the attributes of the cloud; they're looking for self-service and greater agility.

"This is where the pendulum is going back the other way. They are thinking because they've now done their web apps, they're now looking at those core critical applications ... [and] looking to re-innovate those legacy applications."

De Luca said this is particularly evident among Australian businesses, which are leading the pack of hybrid cloud adoption in the Asia-Pacific region, ahead of Singapore and Hong Kong. He said that this has been particularly evident in the last nine to 12 months, where companies such as Qantas have been announcing that they will move customer-facing applications into the cloud.

"Major enterprise organisations are all already well down the track of adopting a hybrid cloud strategy," he said.

"I guess where we're really seeing the opportunity is where you can take a workload and disseminate that across different types of clouds. Australian businesses are using public cloud for mobile app and web apps. They're starting to realise they can take their legacy apps and keep what is mission critical, SLA-driven on a private cloud, but all the archive stuff can moved into a public cloud.

"We're seeing Australia lead, and savvy CIOs looking beyond the web apps and looking at what they can do to innovate in those legacy apps."

On a regional scale in terms of general cloud adoption, De Luca described the adoption in Asia-Pacific as being "very patchy".

"There are no doubt countries like Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong are certainly seen as the higher adopters of cloud in general, regardless of what type of cloud. We've seen that building up in the last couple of years, particularly with the public cloud service providers coming in and establishing a presence in those three markets," he said.

"On the other extreme, we're seeing China really building its own ecosystem of local cloud providers or entering into joint ventures with foreign players. India, for example, they're still challenged a lot around infrastructure.

"Obviously, South-East Asia is very patchy. In countries like Malaysia, Thailand, and so forth, we have not typically seen local players come out with big, bold strategies or market presence, but that is changing very quickly. There's a very small presence in the cloud, but the adoption is accelerating very quickly."