Three months ago, I landed in Dublin fresh off a 26 hour flight from ‘Straya (Australia for the uninitiated). Having spent 20 years of my career in the APAC region – renowned for being early and rapid adopters of new technologies, “cloud-first” was a ubiquitous term. Enterprise was racing to cloud, SME’s were witnessing the benefits and even the Federal Government issued a cloud-first mandate in October 2014[1], wherein it became mandatory for non-corporate government entities to adopt cloud where it is fit for purpose, provides adequate protection of data and delivers value for money – essentially a “convince me why not cloud” approach.
Naturally, being a little sheltered down there in APAC, I assumed this is just the norm on a global basis, isn’t it? Given my newfound status as an Irish Resident, I set about understanding the local landscape. After undertaking preliminary research through Gartner, Ovum, Forrester, Microsoft and Dr Google, I was surprised to ascertain that EMEA is in fact behind the global curve on cloud adoption, particularly in Public IaaS – a market tipped to grow globally from $38B (USD) today to $173B by 2026[2]. This statistic supports the argument that EMEA is behind the curve, however it is set to make up for it in a big way. Is this a sign of a maturing in the cloud market?
