Most Singapore organisations operate distributed IT infrastructure

A majority of organisations in Singapore now operate a distributed IT infrastructure which provides flexibility and reduces concentration risk but poses challenges in data management and other areas related to complexity.

According to Nutanix’s latest Enterprise cloud index (ECI) study, 67% of IT teams in Singapore used more than one type of IT infrastructure, whether it was a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or on-premise and hosted datacentres.

That number is expected to rise to 91% in the near future even as organisations struggle to gain visibility over their data. The study found that while 93% of Singapore respondents agreed that having full visibility was important, more than a third did not fully know where their data was.

“As this year’s ECI report has revealed, organisations in Singapore have largely embraced hybrid multicloud, with this trend expected to rise in the coming years. However, as the amounts of applications and data generated continue to grow, many face challenges in management across various IT infrastructure – from the edge to core to cloud,” said Nutanix’s Singapore country manager Ho Chye Soon.

“As a result, we are seeing an increasing demand from our customers in Singapore and the wider region for a cloud operating platform that can unify, govern and manage processes across different clouds and applications to enable greater efficiency, enhance productivity, and streamline workflows and resources,” he added.

Nutanix noted that the attitudes of organisations have drastically shifted towards the use of multiple IT environments since it started conducting the ECI study five years ago.

In 2018, over half of global respondents envisioned running all workloads exclusively in either a private cloud or the public cloud. But rather than consolidating on a particular infrastructure or IT operating model, as seemed desirable in 2018, most enterprises now see the inevitability, and even benefits, of running workloads across public cloud, on-premises and at the edge.

Nutanix said the goal for organisations now is to make the hybrid operating model more efficient, especially when managing IT environments across the edge to the core. The growing level of diversity in IT deployments, it added, creates enormous complexity in managing data and applications.

According to the study, all respondents in Singapore moved applications between infrastructures in the past 12 months, driven by the need to improve their security posture, meet regulatory requirements and integrate with cloud-native services.

Cloud cost management remained a challenge for 93% of Singapore respondents, with 40% being “very concerned” with cloud costs. Consequently, over half of respondents plan to repatriate some applications to on-premises datacentres to mitigate cloud costs in the year ahead.

Overall, organisations in the Asia-Pacific region had the highest use of traditional on-premise datacentres or private cloud only (26%), the greatest adoption to date of hybrid multicloud (15%), and two to three times the rate of the exclusive use of public cloud as IT infrastructure compared to the other regions, with a 13% penetration.