Is cloud computing the next big thing in Singapore?

Cloud computing has become a popular buzzword, as it is a technology that has potential to revolutionize the way we do business in Singapore.

In the past, starting from about four to five years ago, the trend for cloud computing was to have companies that can afford it, build their own private cloud.

These companies who had a private cloud would have their own servers, their own in-house systems and their own enterprise resource planning software. They connected to the Internet through their own in-house systems that used servers in their own data centre.

The trend has since evolved and now companies in Singapore that want their own private clouds use third-party providers to build them. The reason is simple - service providers are able to do it at a much more affordable cost, on top of having the latest technologies, expertise and service commitment to ensure that the solutions work.

One of the advantages of using a service provider is that companies don’t need to hire their own staff to manage the network. Since technological advancement is very fast, there is always a lack of in-house staff expertise who can manage the technology for cloud, so by outsourcing certain IT requirements to managed service providers, companies can save on high manpower costs that would otherwise add to the burden of fixed business costs.

Local companies are also now moving to adopt public and hybrid cloud models through a service provider. These models enable customers to decide how much of the various types of virtual resources companies want to subscribe to, giving them flexibility to scale their IT needs almost instantaneously.

Currently, we are seeing a lot of companies in Singapore that have started adopting cloud technology doing so in a cautious but progressive manner.

Asians tend to be more prudent, so most enterprise customers do not immediately place their entire range of servers into the cloud but start off by testing out selected applications to monitor and evaluate their performance, to see if these applications will work well in a cloud environment.

Customers are offered proof-of-concept (POC) where they can place selected applications in the proposed cloud environment, and monitor how they perform in the live cloud environment before migrating more applications and systems into the cloud.

For Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), they too have started to adopt cloud computing but they need help in using the technology. Most SMEs here have little expertise in IT, they have heard about cloud computing but are not sure how to use it.

For SMEs, there needs to be a drive from the cloud computing industry to get SMEs to adopt the technology. For example, service providers have partnered with application developers to design administration, accountancy and production software to promote application use while using the service provider’s infrastructure.

For SMEs, you have to package solutions involving the cloud to them, you cannot just sell them server hardware infrastructure as the SMEs are looking for applications.

Industries in Singapore which will experience a rising trend in the strong adoption of cloud computing include logistics, and media and entertainment companies. For logistics companies, they will face a growing need for cloud computing as they will have to develop a lot of new applications.

Since logistics companies move many different types of goods and are constantly adding new applications to their servers, the flexibility of cloud computing enables them to subscribe as they go, empowering them to scale up their capabilities quickly, easily and cost-effectively.

There will be a drive for media and entertainment companies to adopt cloud computing because the industry experiences short bursts of computing requirements. For example, there was an incident in Hong Kong where a TV station presented five beauty contestants in a beauty pageant and viewers had to vote via their PC or mobile devices within five minutes as to who would win the contest.

The sudden and strong surge of public voting caused the TV station’s servers to crash. This could have been avoided if the TV company had used cloud computing to facilitate the voting process. The cloud makes it very easy for the company to adapt to sudden high volumes of traffic.

It is ideal for companies like the TV station, which needs large amounts of memory for a short temporary time – they would not want to have to buy extra servers just to facilitate that short span of usage spike – so cloud computing’s flexibility would work well for media companies.

All in all, companies are moving from building and managing their private clouds to a system that is hosted by third party service providers. Many companies are trying out the cloud on a small scale before moving more of their IT requirements to the cloud.

We foresee that when their concerns over security are allayed, confidence will grow as companies slowly but surely move onto the cloud to gain business agility and cost effectiveness, and there will be many more companies adopting cloud technology in coming years.