Asian companies outsourcing IT needs to meet security challenges and skills shortages

HONG KONG -  NTT Communications Corporation has released results of a multi-market survey which shows 90% of Asian companies looking to managed services to address their IT challenges. Its shows that security risks, talent scarcity and skills shortage are the top challenges to managing IT in-house, and that 49% of businesses expect to move to hybrid cloud within 18 months.

The survey covered businesses in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand.

NTT says Asia-Pacific is the world’s fastest growing managed services market – expected to grow from US$28.03 billion to US$64.01 billion by 2021. The APAC market is also forecast to see the world’s highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 18%, surpassing North America and Europe at 7.7% and 7.2% respectively.

Surveyed executives cited three major challenges for managing IT in-house: 59% pointed to security, while finding and retaining the right people was noted by 51%, and lack of IT skills by 50%.

Security (58%) and cloud infrastructure (55%) were found to be the most outsourced technologies; outsourcing of both is expected to grow to 66% and 74% respectively over the next 18 months.

Over 50% of organisations outsource systems and applications management (ERP, CRM) today, and that is expected to grow by an additional 10% over the next 18 months.

At present, the number of companies using hybrid cloud remains low at 18%, but almost half of businesses surveyed expect to deploy it in the next 18 months.

Leading the way are Singapore companies, with 58% considering moving to hybrid cloud, followed by Hong Kong at 33%.

Half of Asian businesses are considering deploying SD-WAN, which is an enabler of hybrid cloud, and Azure Stack over the next 18 months – a sharp increase from the current deployment rate at 18% and 13% respectively.

“While businesses are migrating to public cloud for cost benefits, most are required to retain key user data in the private cloud for compliance reasons,” the report says.

“Although hybrid cloud is an irreversible trend, building and managing a hybrid cloud environment in-house has become increasingly complex and challenging.”  www.ntt.com (ATI).