The majority of businesses in Singapore purchase cloud offerings from as many as three vendors, resulting in a complex cloud environment that may end up hindering their agility and speed to market, according to a study of Asia-Pacific businesses, commissioned by Telstra.

Too many cloud providers are harming business operations, according to the Telstra, research, which is based on interviews with 675 IT decision makers in multinational organizations from different regions around the world. One hundred of these surveyed are from Singapore, 95 from Hong Kong and 80 from Australia.

Losing flexibility?

Yet pooling resources into a single private cloud isn’t ideal, says the Telstra report, noting that such a model fails to deliver the flexibility required for the disparate processes, services and workloads that global companies are expected to support.

The solution suggested by Telstra would be to move towards a hybrid deployment, with a single partner being fully accountable for an organization’s end-to-end cloud services. Presumably, the hybrid model allows enterprises to leverage the best of the public cloud, while keeping proprietary or legacy systems kept to on-premises deployments.

In addition, Telstra’s research shows that 44 percent of enterprises in Singapore have adopted laaS, and 48 percent plan to adopt it in the future. The figures for Australia and Hong Kong are slightly lower–if similar–with 39 percent and 40 percent for having adopted laaS, respectively, and 44 percent in both countries planning to adopt it in the near future.

As we reported earlier this year, the public cloud services market in the mature Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region is growing, and projected to reach $7.4 billion in 2015 and $11.5 billion in 2018, according to Gartner. Indeed, a study by IDC reported that the cloud ecosystem in the Asia Pacific region is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 67.9 percent, which is higher than in North America and Latin America.

It is hence little wonder that any brand-name cloud providers have established a presence in the region to tap into the growing cloud market here, particularly in the data center hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong. Among others, some of the cloud companies that have set up shop here include Amazon Web Services (AWS), GoDaddy, Rackspace, Digital Ocean and Linode.