Category: Cloud Hosting

Why Businesses Should be Looking At Cloud Providers in Singapore for Global Expansion?

Expanding your business is a crucial decision that involves meticulous consideration related to a multitude of factors. These may include matters regarding strategic location, access to infrastructure, target demographic, tax policies, corporate regulations, and more. For the same reason, when you are considering Asia business expansion, you cannot rule out well-developed world city such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Seoul.

Why Choose Singapore As a Steppingstone for Expansion?

There is a wide variety of business advantages to expanding your corporate empire to one of the best world cities in Asia – Singapore. It is not only politically stable but is strategically located and provides a business-friendly environment for a range of industries.

  • Ranked #1 for Trade Openness – When it comes to trade openness, business friendly policies, and lax corporate environment, Singapore is the top-ranked country in the region. The ease of doing business in Singapore is second to none.
  • Low Corporate Tax Rates – In Singapore, corporate tax rates have a maximum cap of flat 17% that is levied on chargeable income. Compared to some other countries where the tax rate is usually between 25% and 40%, this is quite low.
  • Low Personal Tax Rates for High Net Worth Individuals – If you are worried about personal tax, you should know that they start at 0% and are capped at 22% for people with personal income exceeding $320,000.
  • Top-of-the-Line Infrastructure – Singapore has one of the best corporate and civil infrastructures that is highly conducive for starting a new business or expanding an existing one.
  • Technologically Progressive – Most importantly, Singapore consistently ranks as one of the best countries in terms of internet speed, bandwidth, and digital infrastructure which are all crucial for modern businesses.

How Well Prepared is Singapore to be Asia’s Data Center?

Being one of the mature data center markets in the Asian Pacific region, Singapore’s data center industry is estimated to grow at a CAGR of more than 4% between 2020 and 2025 (ReportLinker, 2020). Some of the major global technology firms have invested in this vertical including Google, Facebook, Digital Realty, and China Mobile International. The public cloud market alone in Singapore is predicted to hit the mark of $2.5 billion by 2025.

Currently, 0.5% of the country’s GDP growth on annual basis is attributed to the digital economy which amounts to $8 billion. These investments by global players are going to fuel the growth at least until 2025 and beyond. Singapore is predicted to hold its rank as the major connectivity hub and colocation market in the APAC region.

Some of Singapore Regional Cloud Service Providers

  • Vodien – One of the leading regional cloud service providers, Vodien delivers reliable digital signage software for popular operating systems and is specially designed for streaming high definition (4K) video at high frame rates. 
  • SimplerCloud – With plans starting as low as $8 a month, SimplerCloud is a great choice in Singapore for small businesses. It offers powerful servers and on the go scalability along with quick deployment and cloud management.
  • USONYX – Being one of the top cloud VPS and dedicated data center services provider in Singapore, USONYX is always ready to deliver with its 6 pre-built apps and distros to ensure all types of business requirements are met.

LayerStack – Emerging Singapore-Based Cloud Service Provider

There are major players in the region in the cloud market, but you want a cloud provider like LayerStack if you need highly tailored solutions according to your business needs (LayerStack, 2020). Here’s why you want LayerStack as your cloud solutions partner.

  • Cost Efficient – When it comes to the annual price of cloud services for a similar plan, LayerStack leaves all of its competitors behind with an affordable yearly expense of only $412. Compared to that, AWS costs $605, Azure costs $1,100, and Google Cloud more than $1,300 (LayerStack Blog, 2020).
  • Unlimited Traffic – All LayerStack servers deliver unlimited bandwidth for your traffic that is subject to Fair Usage Policy. However, if the limit is reached, your services continue to be functional albeit at a throttled transfer speed.
  • Exceptional Uptime – LayerStack guarantees 99.95% SLA through redundant networking and a variety of upstream suppliers so your business operations stay up and running.
  • China Direct CN2 Route – Our support for ChinaNet 2 brings you exceptional low latency, excellent resilience, and high redundancy along with direct connections to all leading ISPs through fiber optic data transfer. 
  • Full Access & Control – The cloud service provider delivers root administrator access to your business to grant you full rights to the server so you can control configurations, networks, and apps.

Final Word

LayerStack stands out with its highly tailored and customizable cloud solutions. The committed team delivers the right blend of reliability, affordability, scalability, and client-oriented experience.

Reference

LayerStack (2020) LayerStack Official Website  [Online] Available at: https://www.layerstack.com/ [Accessed at 20th September 2020]

LayerStack Blog (2020) Comparison of Cloud Computing Brands [Online] Available at: https://blog.layerstack.com/comparison-of-cloud-computing-brands/ [Accessed at 20th September 2020]

ReportLinker (2020) Singapore Data Center Market – Investment Analysis and Growth Opportunities 2020-2025 [Online] Available at: https://www.reportlinker.com/p05918014/Singapore-Data-Center-Market-Investment-Analysis-and-Growth-Opportunities.html?utm_source=GNW [Accessed at 20th September 2020]

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The 5 Most Commonly Asked Questions About Cloud Solutions

We believe there are many reasons to migrate your organisation’s applications to the cloud, not least of which are cost savings, streamlined operations, redeployment of resources, reskilling of your internal teams and talent retention.  

In this blog, I answer the five most common questions I get asked about moving applications to the cloud, so you can make an informed decision about whether it’s the right thing for your organisation.  

1. Is it secure and where is my data? 

“Is it secure?”  is one of the most commonly asked questions about the cloud. But as the cloud has become universal in organisations, the nature of the question has changed. 

Every year, major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft spend billions to make their cloud services stable, robust and secure. Security measures and compliance certifications are available for all to see, and Microsoft’s cloud offering is as secure as it gets in terms of compliance, governance and physical security.  

The result? Today, almost everyone accepts that the cloud is secure. The conversation now is less around how secure it is and more around data control. It’s essential that organisations understand where their data lives, where it may go and who can access it in order to feel comfortable with moving to the cloud. 

A lack of understanding around how the cloud works is a barrier to adoption for many organisations. In the UK, law firms are amongst some of the most cautious adopters of cloud solutions, largely because of questions about where confidential client data will reside and who can access it.  

There needs to be an understanding that, by its very nature, the cloud exists in multiple locations – and your data can too. Azure, for example, for resilience can have multiple copies of data in multiple locations. And this conversation isn’t always an IT-led discussion; it needs the business to decide in which country their data should be reside, and whether they are comfortable with it potentially leaving UK soil. The cloud gives customers choice here, different services having different options about where data is stored, but it’s important that well informed decisions are made in this regard. 

Organisations need to know what they are letting themselves in for and understand how data will be stored and accessed which needs a complex, but not impossible, discussion about trust and understanding. In our experience, anyone who truly understands the options and how the cloud works has been confident in making an informed decision based on facts not fear.  

2.  Will all my IT staff be out of work/redundant? 

Generally, there isn’t a direct correlation between adopting cloud services and IT staff being let go.  We prefer to see this as freeing up IT staff to focus on more strategic tasks. 

Whether they’re in retail, manufacturing, healthcare or any other sector, businesses are trying to be ‘the best’ and provide the best service to their customers. IT should enable them to do that. It should be a supporter and enabler for a business to do its job and operate at its highest level. And for organisations that are held back by inefficient, outdated IT systems, embracing the cloud is one way to make improvements. 

Few organisations today choose to use physical servers; they are costly, require office space and need people to maintain and manage them. Solutions like O365 and Exchange Online are making delivery of common IT services easier, better and lower cost, and like it or not, the requirement for on-premise skills will reduce as cloud adoption becomes the new norm. As IT evolves, the skillset of IT teams needs to evolve with it, or face being left behind.  – Read more

Considering Hybrid Cloud? Focus on the Why

So much of business—and life in general—comes down to semantics. We articulate goals and measure success using a variety of terms. Some serve to clarify; others confuse. Consider the term “hybrid cloud”—a Google search yields 5.96 million results. So, yes, hybrid cloud is a hot topic, but what exactly do we mean by it?

The (current) accepted definition of a hybrid cloud is any compute/storage environment using a combination of third-party and private (on-premises) cloud resources. Yet, this definition is somewhat misleading. It is very likely that your company has already been using third-party platforms and services—a hybrid cloud model—for many years.

Hybrid cloud is less about the “what” than the “why.” The question isn’t, “Should I move to a hybrid cloud?” (You already have.) The better question is, “Am I using that model to my best advantage?”

On-Premises vs. Public Cloud Capacity—Strategic vs. Non-Strategic Applications

The number of diverse applications, systems and business requirements IT must support is growing exponentially. In response, more tools are being made available to help. Public cloud, private cloud, edge computing and PaaS/SaaS models all give CIOs and IT managers options for handling new, more complex demands. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. The challenge for IT is developing the best mix of available tools to ensure business goals are being met in the most efficient way possible.

Source: Veritas Inc., global IT consulting

The first step in developing a hybrid cloud strategy is understanding which functions, applications and requirements are strategic to the business. More specifically, which operations are core to the organization’s purpose or must remain in-house (i.e., private cloud) due to security, regulatory or other governance issues? These are the high-priority operations for which it makes sense to prepare highly efficient, on-premises resources and staff to support your cloud initiatives.

In deciding whether an application or function is strategic, it is essential to separate the IT output from the hardware/software producing it. For example, you may have significant dollars invested in a legacy mainframe with the software and analytics to run mission-critical applications. But the real question is: How strategically important is the output? If it is strategic, then, by all means, keep it in-house. If not, it may make more sense to migrate applications to public cloud equivalents and use the vacated space for something more strategic.

On the other hand, non-strategic functions represent an opportunity to increase operational efficiency and cost-savings. For example, using a SaaS or PaaS provider to host your CRM platform in a public data center provides more space, staff and resources to support the higher-priority business.

Maximum Productivity and Value, Minimum Space

While the functional purpose of a hybrid cloud strategy is to determine which applications remain on-site and which can go, the overall goal is improving the value and delivery of strategic and non-strategic functions. Often, the full weight of your decisions is not realized until later, when you must address the need for additional data center space.

The cost, time and manpower needed to plan, design, build and maintain a new facility represent some of the most substantial investments a company can make. By strategically optimizing your on-premises cloud capacity—and offloading non-strategic functions to the cloud—you increase available white space. This buys you more time to figure out when you need more space and whether your current optimized facility remains competitive with other options. Additionally, your on-premises equipment (because of its strategic importance) becomes far more valuable and productive.

In some cases, organizations will discover that, once they take their non-strategic operations to the cloud, the cost of running key applications on-site does not warrant maintaining their existing data center. At this point, it may make more sense to sell the data center and lease back the space needed or partner with a multi-tenant data center.

Potential Pitfalls

Of course, moving applications and business functions off-premises also has its downside. Select well. Re-locating core capabilities to the cloud compromises control and can erode your competitive edge. And, while public cloud may appear to be an especially good option for smaller organizations, it can quickly become cost-prohibitive as you scale. Should you decide to transition from a public cloud, re-locating your data to a new environment is often complex and costly, restricting future options. This is not to say that public cloud options are intrinsically high-risk; they’re not. It does, however, emphasize the need to view every decision within the context of your long-term strategy while weighing the cost and agility entailed by public cloud options. – Read more