Survey: Singapore leads hybrid cloud adoption
SINGAPORE--Local businesses are moving away from private cloud implementations to adopt a hybrid deployment for their cloud infrastructure services, and are leading the way in cloud adoption ahead of other markets such as the United States and Germany.
According to a new survey released Wednesday, 36 percent of Singapore respondents said their organizations were using a hybrid cloud model for their cloud infrastructure services. Comparatively, 28 percent of their U.S. counterparts had such hybrid cloud services in place and 33 percent of German companies indicated likewise.
Commissioned by infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) vendor Savvis and conducted by technology marketing consulting firm, Vanson Bourne, in March this year, the survey polled 480 CIOs and IT decision-makers of enterprises with more than 500 employees across five markets: Singapore, U.S., U.K., France and Germany.
Quizzed on why Singapore companies took the lead in this arena, Savvis spokesperson Elizabeth Schumacker described it as a "natural progression" as companies here have been "very open" in experimenting with cloud computing projects.
"Compared with U.K. companies, for example, with 41 percent still sticking to private cloud deployments, Singapore companies are looking to the next stage where they tap the benefits of public cloud services that link back to their private data centers," Schumacker said.
In fact, the survey noted that the majority of Singapore respondents said their organizations only started using cloud computing services in the past 6 to 12 months.
Local companies pointed to improved reliability in the cloud services provided as well as low cost of entry as the top two reasons to adopt cloud computing. This finding was somewhat different from the overall results which showed scalability, improved reliability and lower TCO (total cost of ownership) as the top three benefits organizations could benefit from cloud.
During a media briefing here Wednesday to present the survey findings, Mark Smith, managing director of Savvis Asia, said companies here showed openness toward cloud computing and the Singapore government is also taking the lead to push cloud initiatives, such as instituting a cloud computing standard. These were the reasons Savvis identified the island-state as an "important market", Smith said.
To support his assertions, he said Singapore is one of four destinations worldwide the company picked to house IT resources that power its Symphony Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) offering. Launched last year, VPDC is a suite of virtual computing services integrated with multi-tiered security configurations, he added.
Crossing security barrier
Savvis CTO Bryan Doerr, who was also present at the briefing, added that its VPDC offering is "enterprise grade". This meant that customers can expect up to 99.995 percent SLA (service level agreement), security policies and multi-tiered quality of service levels--among other variables--which companies can configure to suit their needs, Doerr explained.
He said the company is investing efforts to beef up its security and compliance features to address concerns many enterprise customers still have about placing their mission-critical applications and computing services in a cloud environment.
Among the survey respondents, 42 percent indicated that security concerns were the main reason their organizations had refrained from using cloud services. Legal and compliance issues related to workloads processing in an unknown geographic location, ranked second on the list at 20 percent, the survey showed.
However, Doerr professed confidence that more enterprises will soon jump onto the cloud bandwagon. Citing the survey findings, he said 40 percent of all respondents revealed plans to use enterprise-grade cloud computing within 12 months. Among Singaporean participants, 48 percent indicated similar intentions, he added.