Singapore firms struggling to support cloud

Singapore businesses are finding it tough to manage their cloud deployments, with 44 percent experiencing performance issues, and calling for more support and tools to deal with the challenges.  

Some 86 percent of respondents in the country said they had encountered at least one unforeseen obstacle related to downtime, performance, support, pricing, and their infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, revealed a survey conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). Commissioned by cloud vendor iland, the study polled 100 executives from Singapore who are part of a global survey that included another 315 respondents from Europe, United States, and Asia-Pacific. 

More respondents in Singapore reported performance issues with their cloud deployment, compared to the global average of 38 percent. The same was true for downtime issues, where 48 percent of Singapore respondents experiencing such incidents compared to 35 percent globally. Another 39 percent in the Asian nation reported the lack of support as a top unforeseen challenge. 

According to the survey, customers of VMware's vCloud service reported the highest success rate at 62 percent and lowest failure rate at 38 percent, where these companies were faced with stalled or failed adoption of the product. Customers of Rackspace's public cloud recorded the highest failure rate at 60 percent, followed by Amazon Web Services at 58 percent, and Microsoft Azure at 56 percent. 

iland is a VMware partner and has Premier Partnership status with the virtualization vendor. 

"The reality is that despite the numerous business benefits for adopting cloud, companies are still experiencing a number of challenges that prevent them from achieving their operational efficiency and revenue goals," Dante Orsini, iland's senior vice president, said in the report released Tuesday. "It is clear that many Singapore businesses — not unlike companies throughout the world — have limited internal resources for managing public cloud deployments and therefore require the best tools and support from their cloud providers."

The study noted that 53 percent of Singapore respondents had adopted cloud so they could more quickly scale existing workloads, while 49 percent did so to achieve faster deployment of new workloads. Some 45 percent adopted cloud so they could have less application downtime, and 35 percent of Singapore respondents did so to address shadow IT challenges.

In addition, 52 percent pointed to deployment speed as a top advantage for hosting workloads in a public cloud, while 48 percent cited faster scalability as well as cost. Another 45 percent pointed to disaster recovery. 

To help them better cope with their cloud deployment, 64 percent of Singapore respondents called for external support in security and compliance, while 54 percent needed it for ongoing service management. Some 57 percent underscored the need for better management tools, according to the report, which also revealed that 46 percent wanted more transparent pricing in their cloud bills and pricing models.

A whopping 99 percent of companies in the country said high quality phone-based support was critical to their cloud adoption, while 97 percent pointed to high availability. 

"Stories about successful cloud implementations are captivating, but the reality is that cloud is more complex than many news headlines make it out to be," said Dennis Drogseth, EMA's vice president. "Companies must be self-aware. Unless they have an experienced staff that can optimize their investments in the mass-market systems of the big providers, they should consider cloud vendors that take a different, personalized approach."