As the largest contributor to global GDP, APAC has become a battleground for cloud platform providers from China, Europe, and North America, all seeking to capture a share of this burgeoning cloud market. Today, APAC boasts the largest share (37%) of the world’s cloud data centres, with targeted investments to expand onshore capacity in emerging markets like Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Forrester has published a series of reports, detailing the state of cloud in Australia and New Zealand, China, India, Japan, Malaysia and Indonesia. Key highlights include:

  • Public/hybrid cloud continues to facilitate innovation
    • ANZ: 87% of infrastructure decision-makers in Australia say they’re using at least one type of cloud deployment today (70% use hybrid cloud, 59% use multiple public clouds). Forrester expects NZ adoption to mimic that of Australia, although it will be lower overall, given earlier, more restrictive regulations and few cloud data centres — but this is changing rapidly.
    • China: 92% of infrastructure decision-makers say that their organisation leverages cloud (80% use hybrid cloud, 85% use multiple public clouds). They claim to have 43% of their total application portfolio in a public cloud and anticipate that they will have migrated 63% in the next two years.
    • India: 91% of Indian infrastructure decision-makers already use at least one cloud deployment model (76% use hybrid cloud, 92% use multiple public clouds). Indian infrastructure decision-makers say that, on average, 46% of their total application portfolio is in the cloud, and they predict that 58% will move there by 2023.

 

  • Modernization is moving to the forefront
    • On average, infrastructure decision-makers at Australian organizations that are migrating to cloud say that 41% of their total application portfolio is in the public cloud and anticipate that they’ll migrate 60% over the next two years.
    • Two-thirds of Chinese infrastructure decision-makers say that modernisation is a top priority for their organization.
    • 67% of Indian infrastructure decision-makers say that modernizing with cloud and new computing architectures is a top priority.

 

  • Cloud-native is becoming the new normal
    • 61% of infrastructure decision-makers at AUS firms use containers on bare-metal infrastructure, on-premises, or in public cloud, and 15% who are adopting public cloud plan to or currently run containers or serverless platforms in their public cloud platform
    • Three-quarters of Chinese infrastructure decision-makers use containers on bare metal infrastructure, on-premises, or in public cloud; 23% run containers or serverless platforms in their public cloud platform or plan to do so.
    • Some 72% of Indian infrastructure decision-makers use containers on bare metal infrastructure, on-premises, or in a public cloud; 27% plan to or currently run containers or serverless functions on internal private cloud platforms.

In another recent report, The Public Cloud Development And Infrastructure Platform Landscape In Asia Pacific, Q3 2022, over the next two years, Forrester expects that:

  • Geopolitical tensions will create opportunities for European and in-region providers. The continued political and economic tensions between China, the US, and its partners in the Indo-Pacific region is affecting cloud selection. Firms in the APAC region have to take diplomatic risk into account when selecting clouds. Taking a multicloud strategy that combines Chinese and US hyperscalers is one option; another is sticking with up-and-coming European or local options like Zettagrid. The latter may more effectively meet the needs of firms facing digital sovereignty concerns or seeking to avoid sudden regulatory shifts. Tradeoffs are the availability of specific services, the depth of options, and the challenges of working with a small data centre provider.
  • Digital sovereignty will remain a key factor in cloud provider selection. Taking a lead from the EU, many ASEAN member states have enacted legislation protecting personal data. Major economies in the region such as China and Australia have gone further. Explicitly regulating how foreign entities can handle citizens’ and other nationally sensitive data. Large cloud providers are responding by improving their sovereignty offerings, committing to in-country data centres and giving customers some control over where data is stored — both contractually and through features like bring your own keys, confidential computing, and availability zones. But providers have to strike a balance between adapting to regional regulations and complexity.

If interested in viewing copies of these reports and connecting further with a Forrester analyst, please contact press@forrester.com.