New Delhi, May 5 -- Enterprises across Asia Pacific are grappling with legacy system integration, cybersecurity risks and rising infrastructure complexity, even as they accelerate cloud adoption-driving a shift toward multi-hybrid cloud strategies, according to a new study.
According to the study commissioned by Dell Technologies and conducted by IDC, these challenges are emerging as key friction points in cloud transformation journeys, with integration of existing infrastructure, maintaining compliance and security, and managing complex hybrid environments cited as the top hurdles.
At the same time, nearly half of organisations in the Asia Pacific (46%) have identified cloud migration as their primary strategy for infrastructure modernisation. In India, however, adoption remains uneven, with fewer than half of enterprises having fully implemented robust hybrid cloud environments, pointing to significant headroom for growth.
The study underscores a broader pivot away from rigid, single-provider cloud strategies, as enterprises increasingly adopt hybrid and multi-cloud architectures to balance flexibility, performance, and control. Sustainability goals, GenAI readiness and the need for faster innovation cycles are also shaping this shift.
Financial discipline and operational agility are emerging as central drivers. Organisations are re-evaluating workload placement, with many planning to move select workloads back from public cloud environments. In India, this trend is particularly pronounced, with 96% of organisations indicating plans for some level of workload repatriation, driven by concerns around cybersecurity, performance and infrastructure optimisation.
"Modern organisations require infrastructure that is dynamic and scalable, while maintaining control over costs and risks," the report noted, highlighting the growing importance of open and disaggregated systems that allow independent scaling of compute, storage and networking resources.
The findings also point to rising pressure on enterprises to modernise legacy systems and reduce technical debt, as they prepare for data-intensive and AI-driven workloads. Cybersecurity remains the single largest factor influencing workload placement decisions in India, alongside latency, performance and resource constraints such as power and space.
Artificial intelligence is emerging as a key catalyst in this transition. The report noted that enterprises are increasingly relying on hybrid and multi-hybrid cloud environments to support AI workloads, which require high-performance compute, scalable storage and robust networking capabilities.
As organisations across the Asia Pacific look to unlock value from AI, the study concludes that flexible, unified infrastructure will be critical to balancing innovation with governance, cost efficiency and long-term scalability.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from TechCircle.