75% of Singapore companies to outsource IT infrastructure by 2021

And over half of the country’s IT leaders will choose to move their infrastructure to the cloud.

Within the next 10 years, 75 percent of Singapore IT decision makers will outsource the majority of their IT infrastructure and over half of these IT leaders will opt to move their infrastructure to the cloud, according to an annual independent research study commissioned by Savvis, a CenturyLink company.

Vanson Bourne, an international research firm, surveyed 480 IT decision makers from enterprise organisations across the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, France and Germany.

Singapore IT leaders revealed that their top three cost savings initiatives will come from reducing IT infrastructure costs (39 percent), implementing a cloud computing and virtualisation strategy (34 percent) and standardising IT infrastructure solutions (31 percent).

The study, in its third year, indicates that Singapore is leading the trend toward IT infrastructure outsourcing. Organisations that currently have the majority of their IT infrastructure in-house are in the minority (43 percent), compared to 59 percent globally.

As Singapore IT leaders leverage managed hosting and cloud computing capabilities to gain efficiencies throughout their enterprise, their top strategic priority will be dedicating their resources to the development and/or management of business-critical applications (44 percent).

“The adoption of outsourced IT infrastructure, in particular managed hosting and cloud computing, is a trend that Savvis has witnessed amongst our client base,” said Bill Fathers, president of Savvis.

“Singapore IT leaders are at the forefront of outsourcing adoption and we expect to see the propensity to outsource increase further over the next five years as more enterprises experience the benefits it brings," he adds. 

Additional research highlights indicate that:

More than half (51 percent) of Singapore IT heads acknowledge that they are paying for excess capacity  because of the need to peak to meet occasional business demands, compared to 42 percent of global IT leaders.

The under-utilisation of IT infrastructure capacity is predominant in Singapore, with half of decision makers surveyed admitting to reaching just 55 percent or less of their total capacity.

Seven out of 10 (69 percent) organisations in Singapore have IT equipment that they now regret purchasing, compared to 47 percent of global enterprises surveyed.

Contractual obligations (53 percent) and company culture (47 percent) are the two main reasons that prevent Singapore enterprises from outsourcing.

“Seventy-six percent of IT leaders in Singapore admit that their organization would benefit from IT infrastructure capacity on demand. This willingness to improve and transform the way that IT is managed helps explain why Singapore enterprises are in lead position for global cloud adoption in our findings,” added Fathers.