Five service providers across Asia-Pacific have banded together with Oracle and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to form a regional alliance aimed at driving cloud adoption for enterprises via a best-practices framework.
The Asia Pacific Cloud Alliance, announced in Hong Kong Tuesday, comprises service providers Hutchison Global Communications, VADS (owned by Telekom Malaysia), LG CNS, AAPT and Telstra, as well as vendor partner Oracle (whose Exadata and Exalogic solutions serve as the platform of the alliance).
PwC serves in an advisory capacity in the alliance in the areas of security, data privacy, and regulatory compliance across the different markets where alliance members operate. The firm will also use its position in the alliance to help its own clients use and invest in IT more effectively, and give them greater confidence in addressing the various challenges of adopting cloud services. said Greg Unsworth, Asia-Pacific technology industry leader at PwC.
Indeed, the aim of the alliance is in part to provide certainty for an enterprise sector that knows it needs to adopt a cloud strategy but isn’t sure why, Unsworth said.
“When we ask enterprises about cloud, most of them say they are planning to move towards the cloud, but when we ask then why, there’s no clear rationale. It might be for reasons of cost, or scale, or faster delivery of solutions, but in general we’ve found that the value of cloud hasn’t been clearly articulated to them,” he said at a press conference Tuesday.
PwC research also identified a number of adoption barriers that remain unresolved to the satisfaction of enterprises, including security, data privacy and sovereignty; performance, reliability and local support; the ability to modify apps and integrate them with internal IT; interoperability across clouds; and regulatory compliance in different countries.