Singapore companies gearing up for hybrid cloud

Singapore enterprises are increasingly in favour of hybrid cloud as they move away from traditional datacentres, a study has found.

According to Nutanix’s inaugural Enterprise cloud index, Singapore companies plan to reduce their use of traditional datacentres from 42% to 17% over the next two years. Over the same period, they are looking to increase their use of hybrid cloud by 150%.

If their plans are followed through, Singapore companies could outpace their global and regional peers in hybrid cloud use by 5% and 7% respectively, the study noted.

Those that already run private cloud datacentres are also looking to leverage public cloud services in a hybrid cloud environment.

According to the study, which polled 2,300 senior IT decision makers – including 700 in Asia-Pacific (APAC) – from medium-to-large enterprises across the globe, Singapore respondents expect to halve their private cloud adoption over the next one to two years.

However, shifting more workloads to the public cloud comes with its own set of problems.

For one, the study revealed that Singapore organisations are struggling to keep public cloud costs in check, with 46% of respondents going over budget on their public cloud spending, second only to South Korea (49%).

Other issues include service disruptions and user experience. Despite Singapore’s excellent connectivity, respondents cited end-user experience (34%) and disruptions when updating (32%) as key challenges for the public cloud. These issues were significantly more pronounced in Singapore than elsewhere.

“Singapore remains ASEAN’s digital gateway and a key pillar within the wider APAC data landscape, pushing boundaries to achieve its vision of a smart nation,” said PK Lim, managing director of Nutanix ASEAN.

“What we are seeing in this report is a realisation among enterprises that joining the data dots via a hybrid cloud infrastructure will become critical if we are to maintain and maximise our strategic advantage,” he added.

Besides hybrid cloud, Singapore respondents also cited the internet of things as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning as having the most positive influences on business today.

The findings of Nutanix’s study mirrored those that were uncovered by TechTarget’s IT priorities 2018 survey, where 24% of ASEAN respondents cited hybrid IT as a priority, representing a growth rate 23% year-on-year.

With more ASEAN organisations looking to implement hybrid cloud, about a third of IT professionals expect to roll out public cloud infrastructure services this year – higher than the APAC average of 25%.