‘Shadow IT’ a pall on Malaysian IT landscape: VMware survey

By A. Asohan December 2, 2013

IT departments told: If you don’t do your jobs, we will go elsewhere
Only 14% believe current IT investments aligned with the business

‘Shadow IT’ a pall on Malaysian IT landscape: VMware survey THE latest edition of the annual VMware Cloud Index showed that many business executives in Malaysia believe that their IT investments are not aligned with their companies’ business objectives, and that if their IT departments cannot deliver, they ‘will go elsewhere’ – that is, the public cloud.

“Most Malaysian IT executives said that improving IT efficiency and responsiveness is a top priority for them, and eight out 10 said that if IT doesn’t improve, their business would seek alternatives,” said Chew Sze-Lun, systems engineering senior manager at VMware Asean.

The survey, conducted by Forrester Consulting across the 12 Asia Pacific markets VMware operates in, revealed that Malaysian respondents are most concerned about the lack of existing IT resources, and the lack of current alignment of IT with business priorities.

Only 14% of Malaysian respondents believe their current IT investments are both sufficient and properly aligned with the business, among the lowest in the region, VMware said.

However, 67% believe that leveraging cloud and ‘as-a-service’ approaches will help or has helped their organisations become more efficient and operate with leaner IT resources – the highest in the region.

“This misalignment is creating what we call ‘shadow IT,’ where people are by-passing their IT departments and signing up for public cloud services – and sometimes racking up bills that are beyond the view and purview of the chief information officer (CIO),” said Chew.

“One CIO I spoke to said that a department in his company actually racked up an annual bill of RM200,000 (about US$62,000) subscribing to a public cloud service,” he told a recent media briefing. “There is a need for greater cost-transparency – users must know how much and what they are paying for.”

This can create a whole set of new problems for CIOs, who are also in charge of their organisations’ information security and compliance, he added.

The VMware Cloud Index 2013 survey, conducted in July, interviewed 2,785 senior IT practitioners in 12 countries: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. The survey was conducted in July 2013. In Malaysia, there were a total of 49 respondents.

High adoption rates

The good news for cloud vendors is that many Malaysian businesses have already adopted cloud technology (31%) or are planning to do so (39%), compared with the regional average of 38% and 35% respectively (click chart below to enlarge).

However, 31% of Malaysian companies have no plans to adopt cloud technology compared with the regional average of 28%.

“The desire to adopt the cloud is higher in Malaysia, which we consider an emerging economy, than in most developed economies,” said Chew, adding that highly-developed economies such as Korea and Hong Kong may have to deal with legacy investments.

He said the most popular reasons in Malaysia for adopting the cloud were to have greater business agility or to improve the quality of their IT services, and only finally for the cost-savings.

“This is good news because it means they see the cloud as a business enabler,” Chew said.

Among the major technology trends, 67% of Malaysian respondents believe a software-defined approach to implementing and managing data centre resources (servers, storage and networks) would have a significant impact on their organisations in the next two to three years.

Next up: VMware wants to get you of ‘Hotel California,’ aka public cloud lock-in

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