Companies in Hong Kong expect to use an average of seven cloud service providers by 2018, up from about five currently, according to new research released today by Rackspace®. This growth will escalate the challenges of cloud management.
The research, which was carried out by IDG Connect, based on a survey of 250 IT professionals from Hong Kong, Singapore and India, found that managing workloads and users were the top challenges of multiple cloud deployments, with on-going management and maintenance also an issue.
“It is clear that there are considerable business benefits associated with using multiple clouds and yet managing multiple service providers and complex workloads is a challenge for many companies. The vast majority of IT teams in the organizations we surveyed already spend up to 60% of their time on cloud-related activities,” said Bob Johnson, principal analyst at IDG Connect.
“We found that the deployment of a cloud management service can hugely lower the costs and management overhead associated with the use of multiple cloud providers. It can also free up IT resources and allow IT teams to concentrate on strategic projects, systems optimization and innovations that improve the customer experience and cost-efficiency,” added Johnson.
Respondents from Hong Kong said they would benefit most from additional expertise in managing multiple platforms and from the ability to manage multiple or complex workloads. A managed cloud service that provided this would help them reduce risk, improve security and provide visibility into infrastructure and application performance.
In a managed cloud service, an expert provider such as Rackspace takes over the management of a company’s underlying cloud services. It looks after the customer’s computing, storage, networks and operating systems, as well as the complex tools and application stacks that run on top of that infrastructure.
“Many companies in Hong Kong want to use multiple cloud service providers to reduce risk, access multiple data locations, select best-of-breed technologies across different platforms and tools and save costs. With Rackspace as your managed cloud partner, you get the value of all of our expertise and the exceptional customer service we call Fanatical Support®,” said Adam McCarthy, senior director and general manager, Asia at Rackspace.
To view the full report, Business Benefits of Consolidating Cloud Service Management, visit the website.
This article was originally posted “Rackspace Survey Finds Hong Kong Firms Face Escalating IT Challenges” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.
