Around 91 percent of businesses in Vietnam expect to virtualise at least 30 percent of their IT infrastructure in the next two year, 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 percent to 35 percent by 2017.

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

"The positive virtualisation trends in Vietnam would mean long-term business savings as the IDC Datacentre Economies Index estimated that businesses in the Asia Pacific region would be able to avoid nearly 100 billion USD in costs between 2014 - 2020 as a result of virtualisation 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 in early March.

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, Vietnam'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.

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

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

In the quest for productivity among businesses, organisations in Vietnam that can rapidly provide 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 percent) and improving operational efficiency (25 percent) were identified as the key drivers for adopting software-defined data centres.

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 Vietnam need to consider adopting technologies such as virtualisation and software-defined data centres for operational efficiency and better resource utilisation," said Quan.

This storage efficiency factor from virtualisation 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 centre space and storage administration can also be realised.

Costs (56 percent), business culture (19 percent), followed by lack of information (14 percent), were identified as the top barriers to adoption of software-defined data centres.-VNA