Many plans to ditch traditional datacentres for fully integrated hybrid cloud IT environments in the next five years.
A recently released study has revealed that 69 per cent of Singapore enterprises expect to run an integrated hybrid cloud technology environment in the next five years, dropping traditional datacentres altogether.
According to Nutanix’s third Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI), this is 20 percentage points higher than that of the global average.
The ECI is an annual research on the state of global enterprise cloud deployments and adoption plans. This year’s ECI sought to understand the progress with adopting private, hybrid and public clouds, and explored the impact of COVID-19 on current and future IT decisions and strategy. It was revealed that more than half (67 per cent) of Singapore respondents have increased investments in hybrid cloud as a direct result of the pandemic.
Ho Chye Soon, Singapore country manager, Nutanix, commented: “The global health crisis has accelerated adoption of cloud technology as enterprises prioritised business continuity and support remote workers. As enterprises here cautiously steer towards economic recovery, they will also be navigating into a new business reality that requires great operational agility.
The agility to quickly test and launch new applications as they adapt to fast market changes for instance. To achieve this, enterprises will be looking to having in place a cohesively managed hybrid cloud environment with unified visibility, management, security, and application mobility.”
Diving into the drivers behind cloud initiatives in Singapore, enterprises reported IT resource control (60 per cent) as a reason for change, followed by increased flexibility (52 per cent) and better customer support (49 per cent). More Singapore enterprises cited cost savings as a reason for moving to the cloud (40 per cent) than both APJ (26 per cent) and global averages (27 per cent).
The report also showed that four-fifths of Singapore respondents have viewed IT more strategically as a result of the pandemic, slightly ahead of the global average of 76 per cent. Improving remote working capabilities (52 per cent), IT infrastructure (45 per cent), and automation (45 per cent) have emerged as the three top priorities in Singaporean IT departments.
“The pandemic has forced businesses to recognize the significance of digital transformation, especially driven by cloud trends, and this will remain a top priority in 2021. Having the right level of digital ability will continue to be vital for business resilience. CIOs and their IT teams will become more prominent in business decisioning and leadership. Every business is now a technology business, even if they don’t realize it yet,” Ho added.
Despite Singapore’s readiness for a new reality, the research identified some key challenges in maintaining a hybrid environment. Security concerns (57 per cent) and managing costs across environments (45 per cent) were cited as top challenges for Singapore enterprises, higher than both APJ and global averages. Furthermore, a slightly higher percentage of respondents in Singapore said that their IT department lacked skills for managing hybrid cloud environments (42 per cent) than the global average (37 per cent).
