Enterprises in Singapore are keen to adopt hybrid clouds as they digitise many of their operations in the near future, according to a Microsoft survey of regional IT leaders released yesterday.
It found that 38 per cent of respondents in Singapore are already on a hybrid cloud “journey” and this number is expected to go up to 45 per cent in the next 12 to 18 months.
Interestingly, 49 per cent say they are still using private clouds and 13 per cent are on purely public cloud technologies, the study found.
However, those surveyed said they were not likely to invest more in solely private or public clouds, preferring to have a hybrid option that gives them the best of both worlds.
Typically, private clouds are the choice of organisations seeking to run their own private network and maintain a perceived higher level of security.
Public clouds offer flexibility, scalability and better cost savings through third-party providers but enterprises have been careful about storing sensitive data on them despite improvements in security over the years.
Thus many organisations are looking to a hybrid cloud, where some data can be stored privately while workloads, say, development work, can be offloaded to public clouds.
Singapore’s IT leaders hold “traditional” views of the cloud, the Microsoft report survey of IT leaders in 12 Asia-Pacific markets found.
While 71 per cent of respondents said they would be comfortable hosting all their business applications on the public cloud in the future, more than half are only using it for basic applications such as e-mail and websites.
Only 36 per cent are using the cloud for application development and operations. That represents a big opportunity to be tapped on for cloud providers such as Microsoft, which see digital transformation as a reason for companies to invest more heavily in cloud technology.
Part of the challenge though will be assuring enterprises that cloud technology is safe, safer in fact than running one’s on-premise infrastructure, given today’s heightened cyber threat awareness.
“It’s a tough balancing act for IT to manage both current and future digital needs of the business,” said Patrik Bihammar, cloud and enterprise lead at Microsoft Singapore.
Enterprises have to adopt modern security and management solutions that allow them to gain management, visibility and control across their cloud infrastructure, he added.
