Containers have become a core component of the enterprise application strategy, as 82% of Singapore organisations report that AI is accelerating their adoption of containers to improve speed, reliability, and scalability, similar to their global counterparts.
This was among key findings of Nutanix’s eighth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey and research report, which measured global enterprise progress with cloud adoption. This year’s report looked closely at the challenges IT executives in Singapore and worldwide face as they navigate the rapid increase of AI use and the need for application and infrastructure modernisation in the enterprise.
In Singapore, 66% anticipate having more than five AI-enabled applications in the next three years, reflecting similar momentum across Asia-Pacific-Japan (APJ) and globally. This is fueled by expectations that AI agents will unlock enormous potential for organisations — from creating new products, services or revenue streams (64%), to improving productivity and efficiency (62%).
Despite this enthusiasm, 77% of Singapore organisations view their current infrastructure as not fully ready to support the deployment of AI workloads on-premises. The rapid rise of enterprise AI adoption over the last year is thus forcing a wave of infrastructure modernisation, as companies race to build and run applications more efficiently.
“As Singaporean organisations race to scale AI, they are hitting a wall of operational complexity, from data sovereignty requirements to the risks of shadow IT,” said Jay Tuseth, Vice President and General Manager of Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Nutanix. “To move from experimentation to enterprise-grade AI, organisations need a unified operating platform that bridges the gap between containers and virtual machines. Providing this consistency is the only way IT leaders can scale AI across hybrid environments with the necessary security and governance.”
Key findings for Singapore from this year’s report include:
- Organisational silos create new AI risks: While AI adoption is driving innovation, it is also introducing operational challenges. Nearly all Singapore organisations (93%) believe silos between business units and IT make it difficult to effectively execute technology initiatives, slowing deployment timelines and increasing complexity. This is higher than the global average of 82%.
- Shadow IT is creating AI challenges: 78% of Singapore organisations encounter AI applications or agents being implemented by employees in non-IT functions. At the same time, nearly all Singapore organisations (94%) believe unauthorised AI use introduces risk, including exposure of sensitive data and intellectual property. Echoed globally, this trend highlights the need for closer collaboration between IT teams and business stakeholders to ensure AI deployments remain secure, compliant, and aligned with organisational goals.
- Data sovereignty is non-negotiable: 86% of Singapore organisations view data sovereignty as a high priority when making infrastructure decisions, including where to utilise containers. This view is also shared globally, with compliance obligations often driving organisations to keep data physically within the country where it was collected. In Singapore, customer and stakeholder expectations (57%) as well as security or data protection concerns (56%) drive the need for organisations to run their infrastructure within a single country, whether on-premises or through a local cloud region.
- Containers are the foundation of modern applications, with AI as the key driver: Organisations are turning to containers to support AI-enabled workloads and modern application development. 88% of Singapore organisations expect the use of containers for applications to increase over the next three years, while 87% say they are already building new applications in containers.
Conducted in November 2025 by Wakefield Research, the survey gathered responses from 1,600 cloud, IT, and engineering executives with at least a manager-level title. Respondents represent organisations with 500 or more employees across Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
