How and why NZ businesses are moving to the cloud

Matt Miller, Director, Field Systems Engineering A/NZ, F5 Networks explains not only that New Zealand organisations are moving to the cloud, but crucially, how and why…

Cloud, in all its forms, remains a trend of top strategic importance to New Zealand organisations across every facet of the business.

So much so that IDC New Zealand's recent Asia Pacific (excl. Japan) Cloud survey reported that 100 percent of Kiwi companies have a cloud budget forecast between now and 2016, with 79 percent using between two and five cloud services already.

Yet only a small percentage (28 percent) of apps within APAC organisations have moved to the cloud. So can we still assume that organisations have fully embraced the cloud?

“Organisations in general have fully embraced the concept of the cloud,” says Matt Miller, Director - Field Systems Engineering A/NZ, F5 Networks.

“The high levels of cloud adoption should come as no surprise, especially when you consider the associated cost benefits, as well as, the flexibility and agility a cloud-based infrastructure offers businesses.

“What we are observing is that for years the IT industry has been known to encourage businesses to move technology into the cloud, replacing, and in many cases replicating, existing physical data centres with a cloud-based equivalent.”

Speaking exclusively to Reseller News, Miller says there has however been less focus on efficiency, which can leave some enterprises with operating expenses (OPEX) bills as big, or bigger, than the capital expenses (CAPEX) that they are trying to eliminate.

Consequently in the year ahead, Miller expects to see “increased interest” in cloud optimisation and more enterprises adopting a “Cloud-First” strategy in many business-technology decisions.

“In New Zealand in particular,” he predicts, “we can anticipate rapid and opportunistic adoption of exciting and powerful new technologies and business models that leap frog generations and drive innovation.”

From a F5 Networks perspective, as specialists in Application Delivery Networking technology, the last twelve months has seen “significant growth” in cloud migration within the enterprise sector, which is the most prominent part of the company’s cloud offering.

“We are all about elasticity of compute and helping customers successfully transition to the cloud,” Miller adds.

“Our virtual additions and AWS integration allows customers to be more elastic, hence enabling them to migrate workloads to the cloud.”

As more New Zealand businesses start to understand the benefits of operating in the cloud, especially in relation to ROI, Miller believes they starting to explore what areas of their businesses it can best support.

“While some companies are not yet hosting their entire infrastructures in the cloud, we are seeing a very high increase in the number of companies moving their key enterprise applications in the cloud enabling them to offer their increasingly mobile workers, fast and secure access to critical applications remotely,” he adds.

“A lot of New Zealand companies have already started to move services to the cloud and we will continue to see a lot of new services coming aboard in 2015.”

Hybrid Cloud

Representing the best of both worlds, Miller believes New Zealand organisations are tapping into the “scalability and cost-effectiveness” of a public cloud coupled with the security of a private cloud deployment.

Tags mobileappsF5 Networks

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