This article is based on a 2020 report titled “Businesses in Asia-Pacific Can Find Resilience and Growth in the Cloud,” published by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS). The original coverage appeared on technuter.com.
APAC Cloud Spending Is Growing Faster Than Any Other Region
According to an April 2020 study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), spending on public cloud services across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25%. That pace significantly outstrips comparable growth in the United States and Western Europe, signaling that APAC enterprises are prioritizing cloud investment as a strategic lever rather than simply a cost-reduction measure.
The study—titled “Businesses in Asia-Pacific Can Find Resilience and Growth in the Cloud”—covers eight nations: Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. It found that companies in these markets are allocating an average of approximately 5% of their IT budgets to cloud expenditure, a figure the report projected to double by 2023.
Estimated Economic Impact: More Than $450 Billion
The BCG report estimated that growth in public cloud adoption could generate a total economic impact of more than US$450 billion across six major APAC markets—Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea—between 2019 and 2023. The study cited real-world examples demonstrating how cloud-based analytics can drive measurable operational savings, including a case involving an Australian airline that reportedly saved $40 million per year in fuel costs by using cloud analytics to optimize flight routes.
The report also highlighted the role of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst for accelerated cloud adoption. Companies across the region rapidly shifted workforces to virtual environments, deployed end-user computing solutions, and used cloud infrastructure to roll out collaboration tools at speed and scale.
“One of the main benefits of cloud computing is access to innovation and agility. We’re seeing in the current COVID-19 crisis that more companies are shifting workers to virtual environments and employing end-user computing, using the cloud to quickly roll out essential collaboration tools. Cloud investments will have longer-term benefits as well, such as risk reduction, the ability to provide new and better services to business stakeholders, and improved personalization of product and service offerings.”
— Luc Grimond, Managing Director, BCG
The Shift From Cost-Cutting to Growth Strategy
A notable finding of the BCG study is the shift in how APAC organizations frame their cloud investments. Traditionally, the primary driver of cloud adoption has been the variabilization of IT costs—replacing capital-intensive on-premises data centers with flexible, consumption-based pricing. However, the survey found that a large majority of APAC respondents are now pursuing cloud adoption explicitly as a growth enabler, not just a cost-efficiency mechanism.
This framing matters for DevOps and platform engineering teams, because it changes the internal mandate. Teams are increasingly being asked to support faster product delivery, better customer personalization, and new service models—not only to reduce infrastructure spend. Cloud-native architectures, CI/CD pipelines, and managed services all become more strategically justified when the organization views the cloud as a revenue driver.
Barriers to Full Cloud Adoption in APAC
Despite strong momentum, the BCG study identified several structural barriers slowing cloud adoption in the region:
- Weak business-IT alignment: Many organizations in the region still operate with siloed IT and business functions. Even where business leaders understand that cloud can accelerate service deployment by 30–60%, that understanding does not always translate into coordinated investment or governance decisions.
- Immature cloud operating models: Outside of financial services and industrial goods sectors, most companies have not updated their monitoring, procurement, risk management, or governance frameworks to accommodate cloud-specific practices. Without these foundations, integrating cloud capabilities into core business processes becomes inconsistent and difficult to sustain.
- Talent gaps: There is a shortage of IT professionals with deep engineering and coding expertise who can design and implement cloud use cases tied to tangible business outcomes. This skills gap slows both migration and value realization.
- Legacy infrastructure inertia: Companies that have not yet modernized their core systems often find it difficult to justify migration costs in the short term, particularly when on-premises systems appear to be functioning adequately.
What DevOps Teams Can Take From This
For engineering and platform teams operating in the APAC region—or building products for organizations there—the BCG findings have practical implications:
- Cloud investment is accelerating: Budget is increasingly available for cloud-native tooling, automation, and infrastructure modernization. Teams that can demonstrate business impact—not just uptime metrics—will be better positioned to secure that investment.
- Governance is a bottleneck: Building cloud operating models (FinOps practices, security guardrails, compliance automation) is often the rate-limiting factor, not technical capability. DevOps teams that can operationalize governance will reduce friction for the broader organization.
- Skills development is critical: Organizations that invest in internal cloud engineering capabilities—rather than relying purely on vendor-managed services—tend to achieve better long-term outcomes. Cross-training, internal guilds, and structured cloud certification programs can close talent gaps faster than external hiring alone.
- COVID-19 as an inflection point: The pandemic demonstrated that organizations with mature cloud infrastructure could adapt faster. This has created organizational memory and urgency that persists even as immediate crisis conditions ease.
Summary
The 2020 BCG/AWS study paints a clear picture: APAC is one of the fastest-growing public cloud markets in the world, driven by a combination of digital transformation ambition, pandemic-driven urgency, and a fundamental reframing of cloud as a growth tool rather than purely a cost play. The barriers—talent shortages, legacy debt, and governance gaps—are real but solvable, and organizations that address them systematically stand to capture a disproportionate share of the economic opportunity the study identified.
For DevOps practitioners, this environment means more mandate, more budget, and more organizational pressure to deliver cloud outcomes at speed—making disciplined platform engineering and sound operating model design more important than ever.