When Kristiono Setyadi joined The Jakarta Post, Indonesia’s most-read English-language broadsheet was running all of its workloads on-premises or in colocated facilities. Four years later, the newspaper has shifted everything to the cloud. Not content settling with the huge efficiencies driven within his own organisation, Setyadi is on a mission to galvanise cloud adoption across every corner of the island nation. Techerati spoke to Setyadi ahead of the CTO’s presentation at Cloud Expo Asia Singapore
In 2015, Kristiono Setyadi walked through the doors of The Jakarta Post HQ to assess the scale of the challenge he was about to face. Indonesia’s leading English-language daily had tasked the experienced software developer with modernising and future-proofing the paper’s IT using cloud infrastructure.
In 2009, storied UK broadsheet The Guardian had already rolled out Google apps across its entire workforce. Six years later and seven thousand miles away in Indonesia’s capital of Jakarta, Setyadi discovered The Jakarta Post was running all of its applications and workloads in-house or in colocated facilities.
“The pain that I felt at that time was real,” he said.
Shifting headwinds
Until recently, cloud adoption in Indonesia has fallen consistently short of the global average. In 2011, just half of Indonesian corporations were planning cloud initiatives, according to Springboard Research. Meanwhile, roughly three-quarters of global organisations surveyed by Symantec in the same year had either implemented, or were implementing or planning cloud deployments.
Like many other nations, Indonesia suffers from a linguistic handicap that hinders technology adoption. As the nation’s national language is not spoken widely outside of its archipelagic borders, the whitepapers and written resources that drive innovation elsewhere have to be translated before they can be harnessed by the country’s business community
In his other role as a Chief Knowledge Officer at the Indonesia Cloud Computing Association (ICCA), an organisation aiming to simplify cloud adoption throughout the country, Setyadi sees to it that these invaluable materials are translated and made easily discoverable. Alongside valuable knowledge creation, Setyadi sometimes gets his hands dirty and helps organisations and the Government execute migrations himself.
The impact of such initiatives is tangible. In February, it was reported that since 2014 Indonesia has seen cloud adoption grow at a compounded annual rate of 48 percent – a rate far higher than the global average. The nation has seemingly transformed from a cloud laggard to an international trailblazer.
Media matters
Like countless other businesses, The Jakarta Post was primarily drawn to cloud computing as a means to shave costs associated with running its own data centres. But as a media organisation in 2011, the financial imperative was more keenly felt than in other sectors.