Companies in Singapore expect to use an average of four to five cloud service providers by 2018, up from around three currently, which will escalate the challenges of cloud management, according to Rackspace.
A new research from IDG Connect, based on a survey of 250 IT professionals from Hong Kong, Singapore and India, found that businesses in Singapore are enthusiastic about multiple cloud platforms.
Respondents cited risk reduction, support for hybrid cloud environments and value for money as important benefits of using multiple cloud services. They also listed their top cloud challenges as managing users across multiple platforms and the monitoring and management of complex workloads.
“It is clear that there are considerable business benefits associated with using multiple clouds and yet managing multiple service providers and complex workloads is a challenge for many companies,” said Bob Johnson, principal analyst at IDG Connect.
“The vast majority of IT teams in the organizations we surveyed already spend up to 60% of their time on cloud-related activities,” said Johnson.
The Singaporean IT professionals said they would benefit most from automated processes for the ongoing maintenance of their multiple cloud platforms and from consistent visibility into their infrastructure and applications. A managed cloud service that provided this could help them reduce complexity and therefore save time and lower costs.
“We found that the deployment of a cloud management service can hugely lower the costs and management overhead associated with the use of multiple cloud providers,” said Johnson. “It can also free up IT resources and allow IT teams to concentrate on strategic projects, systems optimization and innovations that improve the customer experience and cost-efficiency.”