An abundance of high-quality data centers, the availability of high-speed networks coupled with relatively short distances that minimize latency as well as clarity around legislation have made Singapore conducive for enterprises to adopt public cloud services.
Public cloud adoption
That explains the higher proportion of respondents in Singapore already using the public cloud, increasing use of the public cloud or planning to use public cloud services within the next 6 months, compared to other countries covered in the IDC 2012 Asia Pacific excluding Japan Cloud End-User Survey. The IBM-sponsored survey polled 928 IT decision makers in 12 countries from industry sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, retail and government, and representing organizations with 250 users to those with more than 1,000 users.
"Very trusted and enabled hosting of data within Singapore is one of the prime criteria in this whole data sovereignty idea of where data is in the cloud," said Chris Morris, associate vice president of Services at IDC Australia Pty Ltd. "[Compared with Australia], Singapore has these options for infrastructure provisioning within the country and there aren't huge distances involved and concerns about network latency across the continent as in Australia. SaaS is growing rapidly in Australia whereas infrastructure and SaaS have moved into the Singapore market quite rapidly. Part of that has to do with the government initiatives and support for cloud computing."
Compared to China, India and Singapore, Malaysia is somewhat less advanced in public cloud adoption. In terms of where workloads are being deployed, China respondents prefer on-premise traditional or private cloud models while respondents in the other three countries have a more balanced mix of off-site and on-premise deployments.
"Based on what we gather from speaking to our customers, there's more acceptance of public cloud services among the smaller enterprises in Singapore," said Chung Hao Ning, the country leader for Cloud Computing at IBM Singapore Pte. Ltd. "[Additionally], they also look for more complete solutions, not only infrastructure but also SaaS [business solutions]."
"[Since] the larger enterprises [typically] have their own data center infrastructure, they will consider the cloud, especially off-premise public cloud, in terms of their overall IT infrastructure strategy and whether they should outsource it," said Chung. "Spinning off portions of IT, to support a new business, for instance, is one of the considerations."