VietABank invested US$2 million in virtualisation technology application last year. According to VMware Inc, about 91 per cent of businesses in Viet Nam expect to virtualise at least 30 per cent of their IT infrastructure in the next two years. — Photo dddn.com.vn

HCM CITY (Biz Hub) — Around 91 per cent of businesses in Viet Nam expect to virtualise at least 30 per cent of their IT infrastructure in the next two years, according to a survey conducted by VMware Inc (NYSE: VMW), a global leader in virtualisation and cloud infrastructure.

The findings indicate that businesses in the highly virtualised category will rise from the existing 11 per cent to 35 per cent by 2017.

As many as 445 business and IT managers and decisionmakers participated in the VMware Vietnam Business Survey conducted from January to March 2015.

"The positive virtualization trends in Viet Nam would mean long-term business savings as the IDC Datacenter Economies Index estimated that businesses in the Asia Pacific region would be able to avoid nearly US$100 billion in costs between 2014 - 2020 as a result of virtualization of computing, storage and networking hardware, and leveraging a software-defined approach to managing IT," said country manager Huynh Phuc Yem Quan at the report's release on March 10.

The savings would come from four key areas of hardware, real estate/maintenance, administration, and power and cooling from 2014 to 2020.

"As the ASEAN's second most mobile and social market, Viet Nam's on-demand and hyper-connected workforce is changing the marketplace to one that is increasingly fluid and instant. It has become imperative for businesses in the country to look to technology and effectively leverage the cloud to stay competitive," he said.

Viet Nam businesses define their top three IT priorities for 2015 as providing disaster recovery and business continuity (25 per cent), ensuring IT security and data protection (29 per cent), and reduction of enterprise costs (24 per cent).

The strong focus on turning to software-defined data centers could be attributed to the added technology advantages of virtualization.

In the quest for productivity among businesses, organisations in Viet Nam that can rapidly provision new services in a secure and highly available environment, while scaling dynamically as the business grows in a cost-effective manner, will in turn be able to succeed in this new era.

Optimizing resource utilisation (42 per cent) and improving operational efficiency (25 per cent) were identified as the key drivers for adopting software-defined data centers

The survey showed that there had been a paradigm shift in the IT expectations of enterprises, from being just a productivity and efficiency driver to a catalyst in achieving business outcomes.

"With measures to continuously drive economic growth and challenges, including lesser resources such as land and manpower, businesses in Viet Nam need to consider adopting technologies such as virtualization and software-defined data centers for operational efficiency and better resource utilisation," said Quan.

This storage efficiency factor from virtualization has allowed less physical storage capacity to be purchased. From this reduction in physical storage required, more savings in hardware spending, and reduction in costs from power and cooling, data center space and storage administration can also be realized.

Costs (56 per cent), business culture (19 per cent), followed by lack of information (14 per cent), were identified as the top barriers to adoption of software-defined data centers. — VNS