Adrian Hia, general manager, Nascent Markets (South East Asia), VMware, said the report showed that decentralisation increases overall IT costs. - Photo internet

The research was released on November 2 at vForum Viet Nam by VMware, Inc., global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility.

VMware's State of Cloud 2016 research report found that ASEAN, including Việt Nam, has faced the highest levels of IT decentralisation in the world, with at least 80 per cent of respondents agreeing that the purchase and management of IT are completed outside of the IT department's purview.

Across the region, this has led to an average of up to six additional cloud services being purchased outside of the IT department per organisation. An average of 73 per cent of respondents agreed that decentralisation increases overall IT costs.

In addition, despite 75 per cent of respondents indicating that the IT department should be responsible for driving innovation, almost half (47 per cent) felt IT has no control over decentralisation.

"On the back of the competitive economic landscape in ASEAN nations, emerging markets in particular are rapidly transforming with the proliferated adoption of cloud technologies. The need to enhance time-to-market and drive innovation motivates business leaders to sidestep IT and adopt their own clouds," Adrian Hia, general manager, Nascent Markets (South East Asia), VMware, said.

"While businesses enjoy the flexibility and agility this creates, the lack of transparency from the decentralisation of IT opens organisations to greater cost and security concerns. IT and businesses must look at capabilities that enable them to manage and secure applications dispersed across multiple and minimally connected cloud platforms."

Hia emphasized that the State of the Cloud 2016 research also showed that decentralised IT has been stressing both IT resources and functions. In addition, the situation may only worsen as more business leaders become key decision makers for technology purchases, inadvertently contributing to the dispersal of decision making, fragmentation of standards and proliferation of assets across the enterprise – increasing costs, complexity and risk in security vulnerabilities to the firm.

To help ASEAN organisations reconcile the priorities and objectives of both business leaders and IT decision makers in today's multi-cloud landscape, VMware has extended the company's hybrid cloud strategy with the VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture™, allowing enterprises the ability to manage, govern and secure applications running across public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud.