Driving the industry to unlock the potential of cloud for Thailand

The adoption of cloud computing is now such a widespread and influential trend that it cannot be ignored. Its growth is based on various benefits including cost, elasticity, scalability and ease of deployment. For industries that have long struggled to meet increasing IT requirements using server-based architectures, the range of services, systems and architectures that make up ‘the cloud’ may represent a long-overdue solution.

Yet the cloud is a disruptive technology with the power to alter significantly the housing, management and delivery of IT. Adoption has been hesitant as organisations across the world have talked the talk, rather than walked the walk in regard to cloud. It is still evident today that cloud sits outside the comfort zone of many IT professionals and C-level managers. Cloud adoption raises issue of security, service levels, management, system stability and provider trust. The leap that may be required may challenge the skills and confidence of organisations when implementing and using the cloud.

Yet barriers are coming down. An increasing number of organisations are adopting as ‘cloud evangelists’ continue to step forward around the world to help organisations break traditional IT delivery paradigms, through presentations, workshops, training and analytic discussions. With increasing numbers of adopters sharing their successes and their learnings from cloud implementation, more companies are gaining in confidence that smooth implementation and governance can be established. Cloud is one of the key ways of the future and this is shown in the recent DCD Intelligence report ‘Colocation Provider Investment: Co-opting the Cloud for Future Growth’, where revenues from cloud are expected to more than double between 2015 and 2020.

Cloud adoption is still a wild card in Thailand. Early adopters such as telecoms and government, are adopting and providing cloud services, but that in itself is not sufficient. To build greater confidence, enterprise case studies need to be shared, IT decision makers must come together to explore and be motivated to develop firm strategies, and technology providers need to address the practical concerns through all stages from planning, implementation to governance. These should be addressed within the context of Thailand’s landscape, and take into account the maturity level of ICT infrastructure, political risk and government support.

“The community needs to be assured that cloud computing is secured, and this includes a reliable data center infrastructure to support the cloud infrastructure. More importantly, the workforce needs to be educated and be prepared for cloud adoption”, said Dr Sak Segkhoonthod, the president and CEO of e-Government Agency of Thailand.

In response to this, DatacenterDynamics (DCD) is preparing for its second global conference and expo in Thailand with the theme “Moving Towards a Digital Economy and the New Era of Cloud”, bringing international thought leaders from SuperNap and Amazon, together with industry leader, Dr Sak.

“DCD is the community builder in over 47 locations in the world. Building the frontier of this community is our key focus this year. 250 key IT decision makers will be joining us on 28 January at the Swissotel Le Concorde, Bangkok to discuss issues that have been hindering technology advancement and move forward from there. Thailand is moving fast, but it will have to move faster still to be the next prominent digital economy of Asia.”, said Vincent Liew, general manager of DCD for Asia Pacific.