Two in every five (40%) of digital leaders in Singapore plan to move business-critical applications to the cloud, despite ongoing concerns over cloud security, according to Equinix.
Also, the need to remain competitive and cater to increased user demands has prompted Singaporean companies to deploy hybrid (57%) or multi cloud (35%) in 2020-2021, trending up significantly year over year.
These are some of the findings from the Equinix 2020-21 Global Tech Trends Survey (GTTS), which covered 2,600 IT decision-makers across the Americas, Asia-Pacific including Singapore, and Europe, Middle East and Africa. The survey was conducted online between December 17, 2020, and January 8, 2021.
Since the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the risk of cyberattacks has greatly expanded at the digital edge. This has prompted a surge in cloud migration and broad implementation of cloud-based digital infrastructure as part of a hybrid infrastructure strategy.
“Shifts in population centres, the increasing occurrence of cyberattacks, rapidly expanding data volumes and compliance needs, the creation of business ecosystems, and the transformation to digital business, have been driving the need for a new approach to digital infrastructure,” said Jennifer Cooke, IDC research director of Edge Strategies.
“These market forces are driving IT leaders to consider the best strategies and prioritise investments across the digital core, edge, and exchange of data,” said Cooke.
The survey found that 70% of all respondents believe migrating to the cloud is a top priority, with 80% focused on digitising their IT infrastructure. Asia-Pacific shares the same sentiment with 65% of respondents identifying cloud migration as a top priority, with 76% looking to digitise their IT infrastructure.
This move is not being made lightly, with the threat of data leaks/cyberattacks as a result of increased cloud adoption being perceived as one of the biggest threats to organisations in all three regions — 52% AMER, 50% AP, 45% EMEA.
“Moving to the cloud is at the heart of this transformation,” said Michael Montoya, CISO of Equinix. “However, as our GTTS shows, many digital leaders remain nervous about this migration, with IT decision-makers highlighting fears around increased data leaks and security breaches.”
Findings also show that 88% of IT decision-makers in Singapore said digitising their IT infrastructure is a top priority, with 86% working to improve cyber security.
Close to two-thirds (64%) of respondents in Singapore said they believe the threat of data leaks and cyberattacks as a result of more distributed user devices is one of the biggest threats to organizations globally.
Further, 86% of respondents in Singapore said they are prioritising improving their organization’s cybersecurity — a significant increase from the 66% who said this in the 2019-2020 edition of the survey.
