As early as 2022, 70% of organisations in Asia-Pacific embarked on their hybrid cloud journey, a Forrester study found. This is likely why the region is home to the greatest number of cloud data centres (37%) in the world.
Despite these numbers, 36% of in-house IT teams in APAC struggle with multi-cloud deployment, while 32% said multi-cloud migration is a challenge. Clearly, there is a disconnect between cloud costs and cloud optimisation, with many enterprises still uncertain about how to fully reap the benefits of their investments.
During the “Cloud Clarity — Bridging Vision, Strategy and Implementation” panel, organised by Jicara Media and hosted by Red Hat and Microsoft Azure, senior IT executives shared strategies on how to overcome cloud complexities.
Checklist
While most enterprises are worried about burning cash, Forrester’s study found out that the benefits of cloud migration eventually outweigh the costs in the long run.
“Cloud migration is definitely a big initial investment, but it will pay off. You also have to be prepared, for example, if your staff needs upskilling, or if you might need to pull in some consultants to help you reach your goals,” said Nikoletta Stergiou, Consultant at Forrester.
Indeed, cost is also one of the main drivers for cloud migration, Stergiou noted.
“We’re talking about the cost of running a data centre, and when things go wrong, you’d have the labour costs needed to maintain and fix those. There was also a lack of visibility in these environments, so businesses were really wasting some resources,” she remarked.
When choosing which cloud platform to use, ease of adoption is usually one factor that organisations should consider, according to Stergiou.
“If you’re already using Red Hat or Microsoft in another capacity, then it might be easier for you to adopt Azure, for example,” she said.
Additionally, a quick look at what other companies are using could help shape a robust cloud strategy.
“If you’re in an industry where your competitors are using a specific platform, you don’t want to fall behind. It’s worth noting that if others in your industry are on Azure, there’s probably a reason for that — whether workloads are running better there, or some other regulatory requirements that could help keep you up to date and competitive,” she said.
Strong ties
To ease businesses into their cloud journey, Red Hat, Microsoft Azure, and Intel have been developing integrated solutions to address industry challenges such as flexibility, scalability, and security.
Ayush Batra, APAC Regional Director and CTO at Intel, highlighted that the partnership between the three companies goes beyond plain hardware and software fusion.
“It’s more of an engineering-level partnership that we have. In some of our latest platforms, we are bringing what we call workload-specific accelerators. These are being optimised together with Red Hat so that from a customer’s point of view, you get those optimised containers on Azure Marketplace running on Red Hat, powered by or enabled by Intel’s hardware to get the maximum performance per dollar, performance per watt, or performance per cost,” he explained.
Meanwhile, since Red Hat and Microsoft launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Azure in 2015, businesses have been able to deploy their workloads faster and significantly reduce outages.
Forrester’s study found that businesses were able to reduce the number of outages by 50% and the magnitude of these outages by 85%.
“For example, if an outage is an hour long for your organisation, then that would be an 85% reduction within that hour,” Stergiou said.
Business transformation
Across industries, customers often complain about being asked to do more with less, observed Karthikeyan Rajasekharan, Senior Director of Enterprise Sales – Azure ASEAN, Microsoft.
“They are being asked to reduce operating expenditure while remaining resilient and secure. One aspect of resiliency is managing downtimes to install security updates. At our platform level, it’s all engineered in. The virtual machines (VMs) we run on Azure are already significantly optimised, including in their lifecycle, to perform automatic updates and patches, so a lot of that burden is removed,” he clarified.
Additionally, Azure prioritises data privacy and security, not only to comply with regulations but also to ease customers’ minds, Rajasekharan emphasised.
“If you look at the trust and security side of things, the work we’re doing with Intel — running RHEL and confidential VMs — means that even as a cloud provider, we don’t have access to your data. This becomes critical for certain workloads where you’re pooling data from multiple parties, whether internal or external,” he added.
Meanwhile, as an added value, businesses subscribed to Red Hat services get access to Red Hat Insights, which enables them to be proactive with their environments, shared Andrew Joiner, Senior Director, APJ Cloud & Distribution, Red Hat.
“While you might start with one initial vision during cloud migration, it opens up many opportunities, and people realise some intangible benefits down the road. Red Hat Insights, for example, provides proactive analytics and tools to identify and remediate risks before they happen,” he said.
As an example of digital transformation, Joiner recalled the case of one large insurance and financial services company.
“This company faced challenges with their IT environment and complexity in navigating the digital landscape. They needed scalability to handle sudden spikes in activity and large workloads, and to meet industry standards for regulatory compliance. From an operational efficiency perspective, they needed to modernise to move into cloud environments for better performance and cost savings,” he explained.
After partnering with Red Hat and Microsoft, the insurance firm achieved operational efficiency and cost savings, and gained greater visibility into their environments.
Another customer, one of the largest energy firms in Southeast Asia, needed to move a significant portion of its on-premises data to the cloud.
“There were a range of applications running on various forms of Linux, but we helped them standardise their data products for better security,” Rajasekharan said.
Currently, the company has migrated 90% of its workloads to the cloud, retired three of its data centres, and kept 10% of the remaining workloads close to the edge for regulatory reasons, the Microsoft executive revealed.
“The initial mapping took about a quarter to align everything. Then every quarter, we took stock of our progress. In that 12-month journey, we completely retired most of the on-premises data centre footprint, achieving cost savings of around 37%,” Rajasekharan added.
Ready for the journey
To summarise, Rajasekharan advised businesses to get started on their cloud migration journey as soon as possible, beginning with small-scale projects to test the waters.
“It can feel intimidating, considering the scope of everything you have to manage. But as the saying goes, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ I suggest starting with some development test-type workloads to gain initial experience. This will form the foundation for your broader migration journey,” he said.
Ultimately, the benefits outweigh the costs, powered by the combined expertise of three industry leaders, Batra noted.
“The power of RHEL, Azure, and Intel gives you an integrated solution, which is easier to develop and deploy. You get the flexibility not just from a hybrid cloud perspective, but also from an application standpoint. What you’re getting now is a hardware-hardened environment, which will perform at optimal levels, and you get the agility of the cloud along with it,” he said.
Joiner underscored that businesses should take advantage of the best platform that will enable them to capitalise on innovations like AI and ML.
“The rate of change is mind-boggling, so having that Red Hat on Azure setup puts you in the best position to capture all those innovations,” he concluded.
