Digital Transformation in Asia Stimulates Demand for Faster, More Reliable Cloud Connectivity

As growing competition and customer expectations puts pressure on companies to modernise, many of Asia’s leading companies have already embarked on a digital transformation journey. IDC predicts that by the end of 2017, 60% of Asia Pacific’s top 1000 organisations will have digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategy. 

 

As part of this strategic shift, cloud computing will play a fundamental role, enabling digital transformation by providing increased agility, scalability and integration. This will have a major effect on enterprise expenditure on cloud solutions, so much so that by 2020, IDC predicts :

 

• 67% of all enterprise IT infrastructure and software spending globally will be for cloud-based offerings. (Source)

 

• Public cloud spending will reach $203.4 billion worldwide. (Source)

 

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will remain the dominant cloud computing type, attracting nearly two thirds of all public cloud spending in 2017 and roughly 60% in 2020. (Source)

 

This will have a transformative effect, in that almost every enterprise will become not just a user of the cloud, but also a provider of innovative products and services via the cloud within their own marketplace.

 

 

As a result of the growing reliance on public cloud technology, there is already greater importance on connectivity issues such as latency, bandwidth, security and reliability. These factors all need to be weighed when choosing whether a direct, private connection to the public cloud is the way to go or whether connecting via the Internet will suffice. Generally, the decision is broken down as follows:

 

Private connectivity: Bypasses the Internet, offering enterprise-grade connections for sensitive or mission-critical workloads, providing high through-put, low latency and high security. 

 

Internet connectivity: Most often used to support a distributed workforce accessing non-mission critical applications, mostly SaaS. This is primarily because of the limitations of the Internet, which can experience unstable connectivity or latency issues. As a result of this technical limitation, no service level agreements are available to customers using this type of connection.

 

Given that connectivity to the cloud is one of the main components affecting user experience, choosing the reliable connection type will become a critical decision in enabling a digital transformation strategy, especially given the potential repercussions.

 

In the case that mission critical applications are running slowly or are unavailable, an organisation’s entire operations could be disrupted. Even a little slowdown could lead to dissatisfied customers, reputational damage and possible loss in revenue. Consequently, connectivity to the cloud, whether public or private, needs to be fast, secure and reliable. Without this guaranteed, cloud adoption may be held back, delaying transformation strategies and competitiveness. 

 

Whichever is option best suited to an organisation’s unique requirements, ultimately the growing reliance on cloud services is stimulating a demand for faster and more reliable cloud connectivity to the public cloud.

 

Now, businesses can now take full advantage of the Internet to enhance connectivity across their branch offices and speed up the access to enterprise cloud applications. Singtel’s ConnectPlus Optimised Internet solution offers up to 10 times faster access to public cloud applications and a SLA of up to 99.5% availability.

 

This is made possible by a variety of technologies including route optimisation, protocol optimisation and forward error correction. Together these ensure that connectivity to the public cloud via the Internet is delivered with lower latency, packet loss and jitter. This is compared to usual connections via the Internet which can only provide “best effort” packet delivery, unstable throughput and no special advantages when connecting to the cloud.

 

For organisations with even greater connectivity demands, Singtel can offer even faster and more reliable private connections with its Cloud Access solution. This is designed to serve the mission-critical needs of business applications, by connecting directly with major public cloud providers using multi-protocol label switching technology. This offers more security, whilst providing lower latency and more predictable performance.

 

 

Whether enterprises are just beginning or expanding their digital transformation and cloud strategies, all face the same concerns regarding connectivity. Yet as their reliance on cloud solutions increases, so too will the importance of having a fast, secure and reliable connection beyond what is commonly available via the Internet. 

In addition to these merits of these advanced technologies in Singtel’s ConnectPlus Optimised Internet Cloud Access and Cloud Access solutions , enterprises working with Singtel will also benefit from the convenience and peace of mind that comes from working with a trusted partner who can oversee both network and cloud implementations.

 

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