Jay Jenkins, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Computing Services at Akamai, highlights Asia Pacific’s cloud Future.
Cloud: Digital sovereignty redefines cloud strategy in APAC
● Digital sovereignty becomes economic sovereignty: The EU’s 2025 push to reduce
hyperscaler dependency has sparked a parallel movement across Asia Pacific. Organizations
now view cloud portability not as a cost optimization tactic, but as essential risk mitigation
against geopolitical uncertainty and vendor considerations. India is leading this
transformation, with Australia close behind through large scale proof-of-concepts. True
digital sovereignty requires infrastructure independence—the ability to move workloads
across providers, geographies, and architectures without technical or financial penalty. This
flexibility, initially pursued for risk reasons, is also essential for next-generation AI
applications that demand computational portability.
● AI architectures get smart and distributed: We also anticipate stronger momentum behind
distributed AI architectures, as enterprises move inference closer to users and operational
systems to improve latency and performance. This will influence how sectors like mobility,
public services, and industrial automation scale their next wave of digital initiatives.
● AI security is more than endpoints: Organizations will also need to strengthen AI
governance as security and cost complexity rise. Protecting endpoints alone will no longer
suffice; leaders must secure the entire AI data supply chain, from training datasets to
inference traffic and model outputs. This will accelerate the adoption of “AI firewalls” that
inspect prompts and responses in real time, rating at the edge alongside distributed AI
workloads rather than only in centralized environments. In parallel, AI governance will
mature quickly, with provenance controls.
● FinOps finally shifts left: The rising volatility of AI compute will force a major shift in FinOps
practices. Rather than discovering costs after deployment, in 2026, engineering and product
teams will embed real-time cost visibility into the financial impact of model design, showing
the financial impact of choices like model version, deployment region or inference patterns.
Organizations that adopt shift-left FinOps will gain a decisive advantage, deploying AI
applications that competitors cannot afford to match because cost efficiency is built into
every architectural decision from day one.
Jay Jenkins, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Computing Services at Akamai, said: “Cloud strategies
in Asia are shifting toward autonomy. Leaders want the ability to move workloads easily, enforce
strong data controls and run AI where it makes the most sense, whether that’s in the core or at the
edge. With the IDC predicting that 80% of APAC CIOs will rely on edge services for AI performance
and compliance by 2027, it’s clear that the region is already preparing for a distributed future. In
2026, designing for portability and distributed AI will be essential to building resilient and future-
ready digital services.”