Singapore is the most visibly affected, followed closely by countries in the region.

While a large chunk of IT infrastructure worldwide is already running in the public cloud (40%), and this is expected to increase to 70% in the next five years, serious concerns over security risks could be slowing this adoption in Singapore and the region.

According to a recent global report, organisations in Singapore were more concerned about security than any other country in the study, with 96% of respondents stating security as the number one factor restricting public cloud adoption in the city-state, which far outstrips the global average (70%).

This is perhaps unsurprising given that more than half of Singapore respondents (58%) reported being targeted by cyber-attacks in the past. When it came to security concerns from Singapore IT leaders, security of public cloud infrastructure came in first place (46%), tied with the impact of cyber-attacks (46%), and security of public cloud apps (40%).

Results show however, that security is not the only public cloud challenge facing Singapore IT teams. Other concerns highlighted by the report included the cost of moving to the public cloud (42%), difficulty adhering to regulation and compliance (32%), and lack of inhouse skills to manage the adoption of public cloud (32%).

The report also showed that Software Defined Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN) appear to be the technology of choice for Singapore organisations keen to mitigate these challenges and achieve a securely integrated network for their cloud deployments, with 22% already deploying SD-WAN, and another 46% either in the process of deploying or expecting to deploy SD-WAN within the next 12 months.

Extending similar trends are the other countries in the Asia Pacific region. An overwhelming number of respondents said they would move more applications to the cloud (65%), build more applications in the cloud (56%) and use more partners to support cloud adoption (48%, rising to 60% in APAC).

In the drive to build applications in the public cloud (61%) and move existing ones there (66%), APAC was second only to the US.

About the survey

Commissioned by Barracuda, the research surveyed global IT decision makers to capture their experiences with and attitudes about moving infrastructure to the public cloud, concerns restricting adoption, and the security and networking solutions being implemented to overcome them.

The respondents comprised a total of 750 executives, individual contributors and team managers with responsibility for or knowledge of their organisation’s cloud infrastructure, including small to large scale organisations across a broad range of sectors in APAC, EMEA and the US.

Says James Forbes-May, Barracuda’s Vice President, APAC: “The concerns highlighted within the report are understandable, however the good news is that organisations can overcome these challenges with the right tools and processes in place to keep pace with market innovations.”