The Demand for Cloud Computing in the Asian Market
Various companies in Asia have turned to cloud computing as a way of relieving their IT expenses and avoiding costly investments in infrastructure. While regulation in many parts of the region is still a concern, cloud computing represents an innovation that puts computing power and data storage capabilities in the hands of regular businesses at a level that had never before been available. Some of the most well known advantages of cloud computing include its cost efficiency as well as relief from maintenance and implementation of IT infrastructure. With an increased demand for computing power and data storage capacity in nearly every field of business, cloud computing improving at a very fast pace.
Demand is high, but apprehensions among regulators still exist in the Asian market
Developing countries in the Asia region, such as India, Vietnam, and to some extent, China, have adopted cloud technology enthusiastically due to the fact that it allows them to even the playing field with countries with more developed economies, skipping a step in the technology development chain. However, adoption of cloud technology has not been even among all countries in the Asian market. In countries like Hong Kong and Singapore there is still concern about regulation and government intervention, as well as data privacy laws.
Understanding the power of virtualization
Cloud computing is based on virtualization. Rather than having a processor, operating system, storage, applications, and memory all in a single machine, virtualization collects all of these elements in a virtual machine that can be scaled according to the needs of each user and only for the time needed. This means that all of these resources can be shared and allocated as needed between many users, resulting in an efficient and cost effective use of resources.
With the innovation afforded by private, public, hybrid, and community clouds, these kinds of computing pools can be adapted to the needs of different end users and businesses. Virtualization allows a company to save huge amounts in hardware costs and to complete computing tasks at a fraction of the time and cost that they would normally require. In the Asian market, demand for the cloud has been high in the areas of data storage, application development, and app testing, where there is a high need in several different business sectors.
Typical concerns about cloud computing in the Asian market
Of course, there are still issues with cloud computing that need to be addressed. However, the technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that concerns from even only a couple of months ago are are no longer such an important issue now. Analysts in the market have pointed out that some businesses may be affected by reduced computing speeds due to the virtualization of hardware resources. When running tasks that require a high amount of computing power, a lot of the code has been fine tuned and optimized for parallel processing architectures and traditional IT infrastructure. Of course, transferring this code directly to a cloud architecture will often result in the loss of these kinds of optimization measures.
However, it is important to note that this is quickly becoming a non-issue. A year ago, the performance penalty was about twenty times, but today it is only at two times. Soon it will become negligible. Regulators have also expressed concerns when it comes to confidentiality and handling of sensitive data. Fortunately, advances in encryption and security technologies have also improved this aspect of cloud technology considerably (check out GMO Cloud’s Security Solutions to learn more about this). It is important to note for cloud service providers, one of the key aspects that businesses will observe when contracting their services is their ability to handle sensitive data and isolate it and manage it at different security levels.
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About the Guest Author:
Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.
