ASEAN focuses on pushing the data center excellence envelope in 2015

Singapore, 22 September – DCD Intelligence (DCDi), the business intelligence division of DatacenterDynamics (DCD), has revealed that the increase in investment into data centers across ASEAN is due to the changing and proliferating role that data centers and the services they provide are playing in the economies, societies and lives of citizens across the region.

The news was released at the launch of Singapore Datacenter Week 2015, which runs from 14-20 September 2015, culminating the end of the week with its partner event – the Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix. The week celebrates one of the world’s most vibrant data center hubs, and includes industry awards, networking evenings, data center-specific training, data center tours and the 9th annual DCD Converged conference and expo for the Southeast Asia region.

According to DCDi, the industry and its customers wants much more out of data center performance each successive year, with more respondents in the Data Center Asia Pacific Census 2014* focusing on a range of cutting edge technologies and architectures to deliver their IT requirements in line with corporate and community expectations.  In particular, ASEAN respondents are making increasing use of cloud in its various forms, of virtualisations, of the latest innovations in data center design and fit-out, and optimising the components of their IT and network systems optimisation to ensure they have the capacity, flexibility and resilience to cope with increasingly unpredictable and urgent IT loads.

“The industry in South East Asia is reached a new watershed, and the decisions made in terms of this region’s data centers will impact the roll-out of IT in one of the world’s fastest growing regions.  As data centers become more central to the availability and use of technology, and as the transition to cloud, software-defined utilities and open IT rolls out, so the decisions become more far reaching.   This means that the industry needs to break free from its silo’d mind-set. Breakthrough in IT and data center performance can only be achieved with a greater collaboration between the IT, facilities and security professionals within the organization. Only then, we would be able to innovate in technology adoption and best practices, and increase the skill level in organizations,” said Vincent Liew, General Manager in APAC, DatacenterDynamics.

To effectively tackle cost and capacity issues, the industry is increasingly looking to benefit from cloud architectures while maintaining a degree of on-premise interaction.  DCDi noted a rise in cloud infrastructure architectures from 15.5% in 2013-14 to 17.5% in 2014-15 and in the Hybrid Cloud which rose significantly from 9.9% in 2013-14 to 14.4% in 2014-15.

The interest in Hybrid Cloud is deemed as a good step from which to take advantage of the perceived cost and capacity advantages of cloud while maintaining a degree of on-premise security and control.  “One of the misconceptions is that the public cloud is an all or nothing proposition,” said Stephen Orban, Head of Enterprise Strategy, Amazon Web Services (AWS), who explained that many enterprise deployments actually start off small as organizations experiment with porting workloads into the cloud. After all, individual organizations would have varying amount of on-premises investments they may have to keep using, as well as differing motivations and level of urgency to switch.