By Cally Chan, General Manager, Microsoft Hong Kong and Macau
Happy new year everyone! A decade has flown by in a blink. It’s incredible to think that just 20 years ago, AI, Big Data and Cloud almost only existed in science fiction. Today, it’s becoming the bread and butter of every organizations.
How will the next 10 years look like? What’s the key element for businesses to be successful? From my perspective, it will be all about data and how it can drive and reinvent organizations, sectors and even entire industries. It will be the data decade.
Let’s have a look at the bigger picture. Asia is already leading the world in terms of producing data, thanks in part to the large amount of industrial robotics in the region[1]. Presently, Asia has approximately 33 zettabytes (ZB) of data now in storage (a ZB is equivalent to a trillion gigabytes—the same GB you know from your mobile phone plan). That number is expected to reach around 44 ZB in the region next year, and a whopping 170 ZB by 2025, with enterprises comprising around 60% of that 170 ZB total.
Zooming back to Hong Kong – while we don’t have related figures – our conversations with customers, more companies are leveraging their data to derive winning strategy for their businesses. They are realizing that data is the true differentiator for businesses, allowing them to make massive gains and innovations if utilized, or to rue missed opportunities if ignored. Over the past year, I have witnessed many examples of just how rapidly industries in Hong Kong are reinventing themselves by leveraging data, AI and the cloud to level up almost everything about how they work and create phenomenal results.
Modernizing data warehouse for the Data Decade
Data plays such an important role for business success and is the backbone of AI, as well as key to digital transformation. Hence, having a comprehensive and modern data strategy is crucial to enterprises.
Traditional on-premise data warehouse solution, which uses data center hardware and storage solutions, requires continual monitoring, maintenance and upgrades. This equipment could also reach the end of its serviceable life. Replacing this infrastructure requires costly capital investment and possibly locking yourself into legacy/on-premise solutions for the next 5 to10 years.
Additionally, traditional data warehouses are not designed to handle today’s explosive data growth, run advanced analytics, or scale quickly and cost-effectively. Data warehouse modernization is critical to ensuring that enterprises have timely access to the data and analytics they need to compete.
With the rapid pace of business and technology change, cloud-based infrastructure is more cost-effective, scalable and flexible, enabling companies to establish a new and modern data foundation to meet the fast-changing business requirements, swiftly support new data sources and derives new solutions.
Powering 90% HSI companies into the data-driven future
Microsoft fully realized the importance of data and the challenges organization face by undergoing our own transformation journey, modernizing our own data estate and establishing a data-driven culture.
We have long identified Hong Kong as one of the key strategic locations for our datacenter strategy in Asia. A decade ago, in 2010, we introduced our first datacenter for Azure, our enterprise-grade cloud computing platform. Since then, our datacenter investment has grown tremendously to having three datacenters in Hong Kong today, as more and more companies of all sizes and industries have migrated to Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Cloud in the past 10 years.
Throughout the last decade, we have handled and protected the data of many Hong Kong companies. Globally, Microsoft invests over US$1 billion annual on security and operates a 24×7 cybersecurity and defense facility with leading security experts and data scientists that protect, detect, and respond to threats to Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, products and devices, and internal resources. All these are our commitment and continuous effort in protecting our customers’ data.
By December 2019, 90% of Hang Seng Index companies are empowered by Microsoft Cloud. We take pride in the trust that the largest enterprises in Hong Kong has given to us – a testimony of our cloud’s enterprise readiness.
Changes Ahead
As we bid the last decade goodbye, it is amazing to realize what an incredible transformation all industries across Asia are undergoing and will continue to go through in the coming years.
Now as we embark on this new data decade, I greet the future with optimism and excitement, and look forward to seeing many more organizations transform how they work, operate and ultimately succeed using data. Here’s to a fantastic 2020 – and beyond!
# # #
[1] https://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/4769146/asia-pacific-industrial-robotics-market-by
