Cloud

Breaking the four barriers to cloud

August 14, 2020

RESEARCH REPORT

In brief

Despite cloud becoming a business imperative, many companies in Asia Pacific are embracing cloud technologies slowly.
Concerns over value, security, control and trust are still holding companies back from moving mission-critical business applications to the cloud.
But “Leaders” in Asia Pacific are showing the way—approaching the cloud opportunity more aggressively, with a different mindset.
Seeing the cloud as these Leaders do—as more secure and controllable, among others—will help companies break the barriers to cloud.

Soaring with the cloud

Cloud is an urgent business imperative—COVID-19 has driven that home clearly. Companies are aware that cloud offers flexibility, agility and new opportunities for innovation. But are they fast-tracking to the cloud? The reality is that many companies across Asia Pacific are slow and slightly erratic in their uptake of cloud technologies. Concerns over value, security, control and trust are still holding them back.

Our Accenture Future Systems research found that on average more than 90 percent of Leaders in Asia Pacific are approaching the cloud opportunity more aggressively. These Leaders represent the top 10 percent of companies we scored based on their technology adoption, penetration of key technologies and organizational culture.

The chart displays cloud technology adoption trends in Asia Pacific in last 5 years or more. 98% of leaders adopted serverless computing, 93% used hybrid cloud, 98% adopted cloud-native applications, 98% used PaaS, 97% used IaaS and 97% adopted SaaS.

Figure 1: Cloud technology adoption in Asia Pacific
Sample: Asia Pacific N=2603
Source: Accenture Future Systems research study, 2019.

Rio Tinto is an excellent example. The company moved its core enterprise IT systems—including key applications responsible for financial management, business intelligence and enterprise resource planning—to Microsoft Azure in 2016, as part of a major digital transformation program. The result? Enhanced agility to respond faster to market events, spanning pricing volatility in commodities to exchange rate fluctuations. Rio Tinto is now using the cloud as a foundation to explore future possibilities for mining—think drones, IoT, artificial intelligence and chatbots.

So, what separates these Leaders from the others? It’s the way they approach cloud and how they use it to innovate at scale. These Leaders are convinced that cloud is:

Not a cheaper data center.
More, rather than less secure.
A game you can control.
A journey you can learn to trust.

Indeed, value, security, control and trust—earlier seen as barriers to cloud adoption, are fast becoming strong incentives for decision makers to move their business to the cloud at speed. Here’s why:

Why cloud is not a cheaper data center:

It’s a way to “run differently”—to drive continuous innovation, improve service levels and operations, reduce costs, and better support the business.

Why cloud is more, rather than less secure:

Operating in the cloud is far more secure than doing so on-premise, especially for companies that lack in-house security capabilities.

Why cloud is a game you can control:

Setting guardrails for compliance can help companies take advantage of the best of each cloud provider safely in this complex environment.

Why cloud is a journey you can learn to trust:

The success of companies and their cloud providers is undeniably entangled and can be built on the foundation of a trusting, symbiotic relationship.

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The growing power of cloud computing to drive innovation and unlock transformational value can’t be overstated. While many companies in Asia Pacific have experimented with various cloud solutions over the years, they have not followed through with the same determination as the Leaders in this region and in other markets.

Emulating these Leaders and their cloud mindset could help companies in Asia Pacific break free from the barriers that continue to stop them from moving their mission-critical business applications to the cloud—and soar high with the competitive advantage that cloud offers.

Now is the time to build muscle. Time to build the future of your business in the cloud, with confidence.