Reliability, security, support, performance and cost effectiveness are the top drivers for organizations looking to move to the cloud, according to James Snow, a compliance and security specialist for Google Cloud.

Snow was speaking at the Google Cloud Summit in Singapore on Thursday, an event which saw more than two thousand participants gathering at the Raffles City Convention Centre to learn more about Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Why cloud?

The cloud is disrupting the IT world, said Tim Synan, head of Google Cloud in Southeast Asia. Calling on organizations to be an agent of change and not a victim, Synan said of disruptors in general: “Even if they don’t win, the market will never be the same again.”

“What the cloud allows is to focus on the IT that differentiates … [and ensures] that even the small and nimble can access the same technology available to the largest [enterprises],” he explained.

Making the move to GCP resulted in faster server responses and an increase in uptime from 99.7 percent to 99.97 percent, noted Jordan Dea-Mattson, the VP of Engineering for popular digital marketplace Carousell.

Invited on stage to share his company’s experience, Dea-Mattson detailed how his team chose GCP after performing a thorough evaluation of the options, comparing the platform with other popular infrastructure choices.

Google in Singapore

Google has been aggressively pushing its cloud platform with the official opening of the Google Cloud region in Singapore earlier this year. As previously reported, both zones in the Singapore GCP region are run from Google’s existing data center located in Jurong.

A second Google data center built adjacent to the first is scheduled to go live later this year, with a significant portion of the new building given over for running GCP workloads. This will likely be operated as a third zone, bringing the Singapore GCP region up to par with Google’s worldwide average of three zones per region.