OutsourcingStrategy

By end of this year, global data center services provider Equinix Inc will have opened the US$28.5 million phase four expansion of its second International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Singapore. Boasting an additional 3,256 cabinets, the expansion is Equinix's response to growing demand for services from cloud and financial services customers in Asia-Pacific.

In South East Asia, approximately 50% of the region's data center capacity is located in Singapore, according to the Singapore Economic Development Board, with demand being driven by growth in cloud adoption.

"Statistics from Gartner have shown that spending on data center services reached US$10 billion in Asia Pacific last year," said Clement Goh, managing director of Equinix South Asia. "Cloud adoption in Singapore will accelerate rapidly in the next few years, with many companies such as the financial institutions identifying cloud technology as part of their business plans. The media industry in Singapore is [also] poised for greater growth and will increasingly require cloud facilities to effectively connect and collaborate with their global partners."

Enterprises, especially those in the mid-market space, have found it easiest to outsource their storage and compute requirements to cloud service providers.

"[It is a way] to figure out more about the cloud and then identify and migrate the right workloads over time to a public cloud provider," said Eric Hui, director of Cloud, IT, Content and Digital Media for Asia Pacific at Equinix. "Coming to our high-performance, [highly secure] platform that will provide low-latency direct connections [is a good starting point for enterprises building a cloud strategy]."

Hui believes that the influx of service providers, including platform providers, from the more developed markets of US and Europe into Asia will be a catalyst for greater cloud acceptance in the mid-market and enterprises going forward. "The [knowledge that they bring] will influence the markets in Asia," he said.

For now, Hui proposes an evolutionary path to the cloud for enterprises, starting with a dedicated complex compute environment and progressing on to migrating suitable workloads to the public cloud.