Not surprisingly, Singapore came out as the one of the most advanced when it comes to public cloud use among the six countries (Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore). Singapore has become a hyper-scale cloud regional hub thanks to its favourable policies, and importantly, Prime Minister Lee’s advocacy for using the public cloud in the government’s own agencies, sending a signal to the domestic and regional private sector that the public cloud is secure, cost effective, and a gateway to innovation.
(Dec 13): The Singapore government recently released its National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy, which if fully implemented, could lead the way for AI implementation in the region if not globally. To realise this enticing vision, Singapore will need to accelerate its adoption of the public cloud. Not only is the cloud a digital transformation enabler, providing easy access to AI and machine learning, along with nearly-instant data analysis – the crux of the National AI Strategy, it is an economic transformation enabler too.
In a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study of public cloud adoption in six Asia-Pacific markets, commissioned by Google Cloud, we found that cloud adoption is expected to add about US$31 billion ($42 billion) to Singapore’s economy between 2019 and 2023, a sum equivalent to 1.7% of the annual GDP or about 15% of the financial services industry’s annual GDP contribution. In addition, it should be a catalyst for about 43,000 jobs altogether, equivalent to 1.2% of the current workforce.
