Cloud computing technology provider VMWare remains bullish on the Philippines as it sees “very strong investment in data center infrastructure.”
This was noted by VMware vice president and managing director for Southeast Asia and Korea Paul Simos in an interview with BusinessMirror and other media outlets during the recently concluded VMWare Explore trade show event in Singapore early this month.
As the country’s economy begins to bounce back from the pandemic following the easing of Covid restrictions, Simos sees the Philippines as being in a unique position to “take advantage of cloud growth in Southeast Asia and become the region’s infrastructure provider.”
“We’re seeing strong demand in the Philippines on how we’re helping customers take advantage of the cloud for scale and how we can transform existing [technology] into a modern application environment while leveraging scale and reach through public cloud and edge cloud capabilities,” Simos added.
Simos, however, cautioned that while many organizations in Asia Pacific in general are committed to a multi-cloud environment or to being Cloud First, “many are fast approaching a plateau in their multi-cloud usage.”
“Instead of adopting a Cloud Smart approach, many organizations are in risk of entering a state of Cloud Chaos, losing visibility and control as more and more of their apps and data are spread across more and more clouds,” he pointed out.
Simos cited a recent VMware-commissioned study by Vanson Bourne that revealed a lack of strategic approach to multi-cloud. The survey revealed that 70 percent of all organizations responding to the study in Asia Pacific are already using multiple public clouds, only 38 percent say their multi-cloud strategy is fully defined. What’s more challenging is that Asia Pacific organizations surveyed appear to have a disconnect between their applications and cloud strategies.
“Organizations need to make their investments in multi-cloud work harder. It is time to shift gears and transition to a cloud-smart strategy not just to weather what is to come, but to continue getting the scale of productivity and profitability they have been enjoying when they first moved to the Cloud far into the future,” Simos added.
To help organizations in the next phase of the cloud journey, VMware Explore (formerly known as VMWorld) recently unveiled offerings focused on helping customers to better run, scale, and secure enterprise workloads across private and public clouds and at the edge to adopt a Cloud Smart approach to their multi-clouds.
Among these offerings is VMware Sovereign Cloud which now features VMware Tanzu on sovereign cloud, VMware Aria Operations Compliance pack for sovereign clouds, and new open ecosystem solutions. These innovations are designed to enable VMWare’s 25 global partners to deliver services equivalent to those found in public clouds, while also better assuring data is protected, compliant, and resident within national territories
VMWare, according to Simos, sees a growing demand for sovereign cloud in Korea and Southeast Asia including the Philippines as the technology, according to VMWare, is “architected and built to deliver security and data access that meets strict requirements of regulated industries and local jurisdiction laws on data privacy, access and control.”
Simos said that because of the geographic distribution of Southeast Asia and Korea, “governments have concerns about security risk, data sovereignty and so a lot of legislation is asking for that certainty of information and data residing within country.”
“The sovereign cloud program [goes] through a process of certifying those partners in line with government regulations to ensure that they’re compliant. Then customers within regulated industries know they can take advantage of those cloud offerings while meeting the government regulations,” Simos said, in concluding why sovereign cloud is “relevant in every market” in the region.