Delivering cloud goals for enterprises and SMEs in APAC

One of the biggest challenges for businesses when it comes to cloud migration is that a majority of them struggle with designing an architecture that can both their security and configuration of assets. Next comes the concerns on compliance and regulation which for some organizations, may just be too much to handle.

Apart from that, there is also the fear of spiraling costs in their cloud journey. Many fear that they will not be able to control the costs as they continually enhance their cloud capabilities. Despite this, most businesses are aware of the importance of embracing the cloud and are willing to make the journey with the tech vendor.

According to Jay Upchurch, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at SAS, data integration is one of the key areas in the cloud today. While the concerns are there, tech vendors like SAS today work with organizations to ensure they know how to optimize their performance.

“The world is still learning to be data-driven. We have not figured out how to take advantage and understand the full risks of technology. There are a lot of bad cases organizations get worried about, like how data is used. But there is also a lot of good,” commented Upchurch.

For SAS, the growth of cloud adoption for them in the Asia Pacific region has been promising in both the enterprise and small businesses, especially in the emerging markets. In fact, Upchurch said that SAS has witnessed a mix of customers that are not only looking to migrate from on-premises to the cloud but also several new ones.

“The world is different. Some regions pride themselves on building their cloud infrastructure and some focus more on the business outcomes and time to market. SAS speaks well to these regions. In APAC, a lot of industry solutions specifically focus on fraud, risk, and life sciences. There’s an appetite for the outcome and they don’t want to take the time to build it all and put it all together. At SAS, we love analytics in the cloud. We also know that that’s complex sometimes when you try to stitch all the pieces together,” added Upchurch.

Hence, Upchurch pointed out that SAS cloud gets all this together as a deliverable, so organizations can get faster to their business outcome, which is probably the original investment in the first place. And Upchurch believes that this is something that the APAC region is seeing a lot of excitement and adoption.

With that said, organizations deploying SAS Viya, SAS’ cloud-native AI, analytic, and data management platform, on Microsoft Azure can see benefits including a 204% return on investment over three years, according to a new commissioned Total Economic Impact study conducted by Forrester Consulting.

Prior to implementing SAS Viya on Azure, businesses noted that barriers to data access and disparate data sources made it difficult and time-consuming to build, deploy and manage AI models. Other issues they faced included the inefficiencies and high costs of on-premises analytics infrastructure.

“This study shows we are jointly delivering on our promise and providing immense value to our customers, including cost reduction, increased time to value, and improved productivity for data scientists and analysts across industries,” added Upchurch.

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