Frost & Sullivan’s latest report indicates that the “robust momentum” which currently characterises the Australian IaaS and cloud computing market, sees many organisations, from large companies to SMBs, adopting cloud solutions.
According to Frost & Sullivan’s Industry Analyst, Datacenter and Cloud Computing, APAC ICT, Mayank Kapoor, most of the large organisations in Australia have now deployed a private cloud environment and “many are considering or have begun implementing an increasing number of mission critical workloads in the cloud.”
Kapoor says, however, that despite the benefits of cloud, many IT departments are still reluctant to move to the cloud, with common barriers to adoption including perceived loss of control, data sovereignty and security concerns when they move their workload and infrastructure to cloud.
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Frost & Sullivan reports that the pure play IaaS vendors primarily global players and first movers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) and Rackspace, and recent entrants in the local IaaS market such as OrionVM, Cloud Central, Zetta Grid and UltraServe, are witnessing good success in the Australia IaaS Market.
“Telecommunications providers are actively moving into the cloud space and have a strategic advantage as they may leverage their strong network capabilities through their underlying network, and can offer private and public cloud offerings bundled with carriage, said Phil Harpur, Frost & Sullivan’s Senior Research Manager, Australia & New Zealand.
According to Harpur, Telstra, Optus, Macquarie Telecom and AAPT have already embarked on cloud offerings as part of their strategic direction.
“A fast growing category is the Managed Service Providers (MSP’s) in the IaaS space. Dimension Data, IBM, Fujitsu, HP, and local providers such as Brennan IT, Harbour IT and Melbourne IT are all expanding offerings in the cloud computing.”
Harpur says that vendors in the IaaS market with a local data centre presence will have an edge over other players, “hence we are witnessing many of the local IaaS players starting to establish, or expand their local data presence in Australia.”
Frost & Sullivan cites one of the key benefits of using cloud-based IaaS solutions as the significant upfront savings that can be achieved, in terms of hardware and also associated maintenance costs, with the cloud model eliminating much upfront capital outlay.
“Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is rapidly becoming the delivery model of choice for companies looking at greenfield, test and development type of deployments or hosting applications in the cloud,” says Harpur.
“With such low barriers to entry, the commercial case for any business of any size to adopt IaaS solutions is strong.”
