"Keeping costs down continues to be the primary focus of Asia/Pacific manufacturers," said Dr William Lee, senior research manager for IDC Manufacturing Insights Asia/Pacific. The report Manufacturing and Cloud Computing: A View from Asia Pacific excluding Japan compiled responses from 59 manufacturers across the region.

"As most benefits of cloud computing do not directly translate to lower total cost of ownership when compared to traditional on-site IT deployments, take-up has been slow till date with fewer than 10 percent of manufacturing firms across APEJ currently adopting the technology," said Lee.

Security, not surprisingly, continues to be the biggest cloud adoption barrier for APEJ manufacturers. However, their security concern is not just about data breaches of sensitive information. The manufacturers are anxious about the consequent loss of time and expenditure of resources to reproduce the data.

"The cloud is often perceived as less secure compared to retaining data in-house. In reality, most security breaches are internal. Therefore, having data residing in the cloud does not necessarily make it more vulnerable to security risks," said Lee.

The survey findings revealed that half of the respondents are holding back on adopting cloud-based solutions due to concerns on encountering last mile connection speed problems.