Despite the choppy economy this year, real growth in information technology spending, cloud computing and big data were leading the era of IT transformation, said Ajit Nair, managing director, Southeast Asia Emerging Markets at EMC Corp, at a workshop on Saturday in Da Nang.

For illustration only, Photo: Cloud Computing

"Though the time is not ideal, there will be real growth, and Asia-Pacific is expected to grow faster than average," Ajit said.

Last year, Asia-Pacific ranked second in terms of IT spending, with an increase of 10.9 per cent, following Latin America with a rise of 16.3 per cent, according to International Data Corporation (IDC), a global market intelligence firm. This year, global IT spending is forecast to grow 3-5 per cent and Asia Pacific will lead the world with an increase of 7.3 per cent.

"Vietnam will grow faster than most countries in the Asia Pacific," Ajit said, arguing the country was one of Asia's strongest emerging markets with increased infrastructure developments as good opportunities for both foreign and domestic investments.

Nguyen Duc Toan, country director of EMC Vietnam said, while the top three concerns of CIOs (chief information officer) focused on limited budgets, a data boom and data security, cloud computing was considered the ideal solution to help businesses overcome such difficulties.

The cloud environment allows enterprises to get their applications up and running faster with easier manageability and less maintenance. IT resources would be provided on demand to meet the fluctuating and unpredictable business demand as well.

However, he also said cloud computing was a concept rather than a product, for which meeting the five criteria of rapid elasticity, measured service, on-demand self service, resource pooling and broad network access were necessary.

Currently in Vietnam, DongA Bank is the first enterprise building data centre based on this model of computing and it has completed the first stage of IT environment virtualisation.

Tran Nguyen Vu, deputy director of the Ministry of Finance's Department of Financial Informatics and Statistics, also said his ministry on its way to the cloud application using EMC Symmetrix VMAX storage platform with an open environment to store, analyse and use large amounts of data.

Source: VNS