Singapore businesses call for greater support to face cloud challenges
Tue 25 Nov 2014
Singapore businesses are struggling to adopt and support cloud-based services, a survey conducted by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has revealed.
The survey, commissioned by iland, questioned over 100 IT professionals from medium to large organisations in Singapore. It found that 86% of businesses in the city had experienced at least one unexpected challenge with their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider. Downtime, performance problems, lack of support, and pricing topped the list of complaints.
The full whitepaper, Casualties of Cloud Wars: Customers Are Paying the Price, noted that more companies in Singapore had experienced problems with downtime (48 percent) and performance (44 percent) than those in both the U.S. and Europe.
Customers of Rackspace’s public cloud reported the highest failure rate (60 percent), followed by Amazon Web Services (58 percent), and Microsoft Azure (56 percent).
However the report highlighted that despite these obstacles, companies in Singapore remain interested in cloud deployment in order to tackle shadow IT (35 percent), to obtain faster scaling of existing workloads (53 percent), to lessen downtime (45 percent), and to increase deployment speeds of new workloads (49 percent).
“Stories about successful cloud implementations are captivating, but the reality is that cloud is more complex than many news headlines make it out to be,” said Dennis Drogseth, vice president at EMA.
“Companies must be self-aware. Unless they have an experienced staff that can optimize their investments in the mass-market systems of the big providers, they should consider cloud vendors that take a different, personalized approach,” Drogseth continued.
“It is clear that many Singapore businesses – not unlike companies throughout the world – have limited internal resources for managing public cloud deployments and therefore require the best tools and support from their cloud providers,” added Dante Orsini, senior vice president, iland.
Summarising the findings Lilac Schoenbeck, VP of product management and marketing at iland, also suggested that businesses in the APAC region and elsewhere must “evaluate their internal resources – including technology, personnel, expertise and budget – and choose a cloud vendor that offers the services, support and functionality that can address their specific needs” and therefore avoiding typical cloud-related issues, such as those highlighted in the survey.
