There is a need to strengthen Malaysia’s public cloud infrastructure to accommodate the large numbers of remote workers given the pandemic, a Nutanix study found.
A total of 67% Malaysian respondents in the survey said that they had boosted public cloud usage and 51% said they had increased hybrid cloud usage.
The country is now experiencing its greatest increase in private cloud adoption as more people work outside the office.
In their third annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report, Nutanix surveyed 3,400 IT decision-makers around the world to measure the state of global enterprise cloud deployments and adoption plans. A breakdown of the Malaysian figures or specific demographics was not included in the report. However, a spokesperson has shared that the sample size is statistically significant.
For their Malaysia edition, Nutanix identified the key findings gathered from IT professionals in Malaysia, and revealed how they compare to enterprise cloud experiences and plans in both the Asia Pacific and around the world.
Fifty-eight percent of Malaysian respondents revealed that COVID-19 caused an increase in their investment in private cloud, surpassing the global average (37%) and the rest of APJ (44%).
Other key findings shared in the ECI report:
- Hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operating model
Nearly all respondents from Malaysia (96%) identified hybrid cloud as the ideal infrastructure for their organisations, outpacing those in the APJ region (90%) and in the global response pool (87%). Malaysian respondents run slightly more hybrid clouds than average today with 14% penetration, which they intend to grow to 57% penetration in five years.
- Malaysia is more determined to expand their public multicloud environments
They expect to grow public multi-cloud use by 6% in five years—the only infrastructure growth area cited by Malaysian respondents other than hybrid cloud. In the next year, they expect to increase their use of two public clouds from 25% to 39% and their use of three public clouds from 13% to 22%. However, they expect their use of more than three public cloud services to remain static at just 5% during that time.
- Cost isn’t a primary driver behind IT infrastructure change in Malaysia
Rather than cost, the motivation behind improvements to their IT infrastructures is to increase flexibility to meet business needs (74%). From there, three goals tie for second place as inspiring change, with 63% of respondents from Malaysia selecting each of the following factors: 1) gaining better control of IT resource usage, 2) increasing the speed of meeting business needs, and 3) better supporting customers. By contrast, cost savings was cited by just 29% of respondents from Malaysia.
- The global pandemic has raised IT’s profile and accelerated cloud adoption
88% of respondents in Malaysia shared that COVID-19 has resulted in IT being viewed more strategically in their organisations. In addition, 67% of Malaysian respondents have increased their investments in public cloud, 58% have increased investments in private cloud, and 51% have increased their hybrid cloud investments as a direct result of the pandemic.
- Although they were behind on private cloud adoption, Malaysian IT pros report above-average progress with hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)
More than half (59%) revealed that they have deployed HCI, or are in the process of deploying it in their data centres, compared to 50% of global respondents. The relevance of HCI is that it creates a foundation for private cloud by virtualising and integrating data centre compute, storage, and networking devices in standard, off-the-shelf server hardware. Private clouds built upon this foundation ultimately merge with public cloud infrastructure services into the hybrid cloud setup that most ECI respondents say is the ideal infrastructure they are working towards.
