China, India lead cloud adoption in APAC, Forrester says

The report—which surveyed decision-makers across all APAC countries including India, China, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia and New Zealand—showed that 92% of China-based respondents use cloud in some form. This is slightly higher than in India, where 91% of decision-makers said that they use some form of cloud technology, followed by Australia, where 87% of respondents said that they use cloud in some form.

Forrester said it expects New Zealand cloud adoption trends to follow those in Australia, adding that although the New Zealand cloud landscape is changing, overall adoption is lower overall due to earlier, more restrictive regulations and fewer cloud data centres.

China and India’s high cloud-uptake numbers are complemented by growth of data centers in the region. The APAC region boasts the largest share, around 37%, of data centers globally, Forrester noted. The market research company added that there are targeted investments to expand onshore capacity in emerging markets like Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

India leads in public cloud uptake

In terms of public cloud usage or uptake, India has an edge over China, according to the report. Nearly 92% of all Indian decision-makers who said that they use cloud in some form claimed to use public cloud. In China, only 85% of all respondents who said that they use cloud in some form, also said that they use public cloud.

Further, Indian enterprises are roughly at par with China when it comes to IT modernization, the report showed.

While 67% of Indian decision-makers surveyed said that modernizing with cloud and new computing architectures was a top priority, approximately the same number—66.66%—of Chinese decision-makers said the same about modernization and new computing architectures.

Applications move to the cloud

In terms of application portfolio in the cloud, India remains somewhat ahead of China and Australia. While Indian decision-makers on an average said that 46% of their total application portfolio is in the cloud, Chinese respondents said that only 43% of their total applications are cloud native. Their Australian counterparts said that 41% of their application portfolio resided in the cloud, the report showed.

However, Chinese decision-makers claimed that by the end of 2023, they will have moved at least 63% of their applications to the cloud. This is in contrast to Australian decision-makers, who said they will have moved 60% of their application load by the end of 2023.

Indian decision-makers, on the other hand, said that they would probably be able to move only about 58% of their application load to the cloud.

Further, nearly 72% of Indian decision-makers said that they already use containers on bare metal infrastructure—either on-premises or in the cloud.

Meanwhile, at least 75% of Chinese respondents said they already use containers on bare metal infrastructure—either on-premises or in the cloud—followed by 72% of Indian decision-makers and 61% of Australian respondents.