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The Adoption of Cloud Computing in the Asian Gaming Industry

In 2011 there was a massive shift in the gaming industry in Southeast Asia. When high profile game developers in the region announced that they would use cloud computing extensively throughout their operations in the region, the landscape for other gaming companies in Southeast Asia changed dramatically. The main reason why companies started to adopt cloud technology for their operations was to achieve better scalability and provide a more reliable service at a lower cost. Interactive entertainment requires a significant investment in IT infrastructure and moving it to the cloud allows companies to save significantly while improving the services they provide at the same time.

Significant improvements in security and in legislation in Southeast Asia resulted in companies fully embracing the move. The main advantage of cloud computing platforms for gaming enterprises is an increase in business agility as well as significant savings across the board. Companies in the region have started to share their insights, leading many to speculate about the enormous potential of this technology in the Southeast Asian market.

The initial adoption

Online gaming providers were among the first gaming companies in Southeast Asia to embrace cloud computing. These kinds of companies have a very important presence in the region due to the enormous demand for MMORPGs (massive multi-player online role playing games) which have grown dramatically in recent years. Companies with licenses to provide popular Western games in the region have also used cloud computing to decrease costs.

Online gaming companies based in Singapore represent an important service hub in the region, providing their services to most of the surrounding countries. In fact, most of the major online games played in Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia (and other countries too) are provided by companies based in Singapore. One of the main reasons for this is that Singapore’s advanced IT infrastructure, commercial environment, and legislation makes it particularly welcoming to these kinds of firms.

Cloud computing and online gaming providers

There are several ways in which online gaming providers have taken advantage of cloud computing to improve their services. Cloud computing is not only used to host game platforms and decrease IT costs. It has also been observed that cloud computing infrastructure plays an important role in all aspects of a companies’ daily operations, from managing accounts and payments to making sure that all users receive the services they have paid for. Cloud service providers with a presence in the Southeast Asian region will often participate in all aspects of the operation of online games, increasing productivity and growth.

Cloud computing providers allow companies to save enormously (up to sixty percent in operational IT expenses) thanks to the power of device virtualization. Data center costs for online gaming can be enormous and can be relieved significantly with the aid of these technologies. They also allow companies to have a more environmentally-friendly presence, decreasing companies’ carbon footprint and resource usage. In general, the main advantage is that gaming providers can focus more on the actual business of creating virtual worlds and entertaining new gaming concepts rather than on the daily business of managing data centers and accounts.

Evaluating the results

Has cloud computing usage been successful for companies who have jumped on board? By all measures, it appears to be so. Companies that adopted cloud computing early are now among the regional leaders, thanks to the significant savings the technology provides and the subsequent improvement to service. Virtualized environments provide scalability while allowing online gaming providers to avoid dealing with the complexity that this brings to the system.

Cloud service providers with a particular emphasis on providing their services to online gaming companies will find that the Asian market, particularly the Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia, is especially receptive to these technologies. However, competition in the region is fierce, meaning that it will often be a question of innovating and finding ways to provide a unique service to these businesses that other cloud computing firms cannot match.

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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.

The Role of Social Media in Disaster Management

In the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan back in 2011, social media was critical in raising awareness of the situation and gathering charitable contributions and funds. Online social networks were essential in helping people contribute by text messages to the Red Cross, donate through online social games such as those developed by Zynga, or participate in a number of community-backed initiatives.

Around the world, social tools have been greatly facilitated crisis communication. Applications and websites such as Google’s Person Finder helped many families find information about their loved ones after the Haiti earthquake of 2010 without bogging down critical communication channels. Person Finder was used in wake of the Japan and New Zealand earthquakes as well, a useful tool to help families locate their loved ones.

Social media and spreading the news

Due to the time difference between Japan and Europe, most of the Western world found out about the Japanese earthquake and tsunami a few hours after the fact. However unlike other natural disasters, there was a very large community of people following the events in real time through social media. After hurricane Katrina hit the United States in 2005, the role of social media to help spread news increased exponentially. The difference between the news reporting on social media with Katrina and five years later in the Haiti earthquake is enormous and is a testament to the rapid development of this technology. In the case of Haiti in particular, social media websites were instrumental in generating support to round up resources to help the victims.

Sources go direct

News outlets can also receive a considerable boost from social media resources. For example, during the Japan earthquake phone services were disrupted for a significant period of time. Fortunately, social media channels remained open. An hour after the earthquake, more than one thousand tweets per minute were being broadcast from Tokyo and only a few hours after the disaster, hashtags related to the disaster contained thousands of new tweets and retweets per second. Essentially, user-generated information raised awareness of the crisis to a degree unheard of a decade ago. Many news organizations have found that social media allows the public to connect to a natural disaster. Rather than being just news from a second hand source or a reporter, social media gives people on site a voice. This raises empathy and awareness, allowing people from around the world to connect to the first hand accounts of such crises.

Relief aid organizations can also benefit greatly from social media during a natural disaster. With the aid of existing social media platforms and websites, relief organizations were able to gather considerable contributions in the wake of the disaster (although some struggled to deliver it to those in need). Zynga allowed users to contribute through some of its most popular games, raising two million dollars for organizations like the Save the Children Japan Earthquake Tsunami Emergency Fund. When it comes to disaster relief, social media has become a game changer.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

Mobile Services and Fixed Internet Use in Japan

As with other mature mobile markets, smartphone adoption and advanced mobile services are on the upswing in Japan. Email and social media are the most important mobile internet services in Japan today. Other services like search or reference services, are not as popular on mobile platforms as much as they are on desktop devices. At least in Japan, mobile and desktop online services are used to complement each other’s strengths.

Smartphones and Japanese society

In Japan, the number of subscribers for mobile internet services is enormous, and far above the number in other developed nations. Even going back to 2009, surveys showed that already about three fourths of Japanese internet users used both mobile and desktop devices, and about ten percent of all Japanese users accessed the internet only on their mobile device. This means that in Japan, most people’s contact with the internet is often primarily through a mobile device, contrary to what happens in the West.

Strategies enacted in 2010 have resulted in the widespread availability of advanced network services and some of the world’s most advanced broadband and communications services. This initiative has the objective of keeping Japan competitive despite the fact that the population is shrinking due to aging. In fact, Japan has the second highest use of this technology in the whole world.

Japan’s unique mobile culture

Studies carried out as far back as 2002 have found that the mobile phone in Japan has an important function in keeping families together and strengthening the bonds between non-related friends. Even people that have frequent face to face contact are very likely to use mobile devices to communicate regularly. Because of this, the mobile phone has a much more important social role than the PC or the internet itself. Keitai culture (or mobile culture) in Japan is unique in that it seems to have originated from Nagara, a Japanese tradition of multitasking and doing different things while being mobile. Japanese media users tend to avoid direct communication, usually engaging in short message services (SMS) or in social media networks rather than calling each other directly. This has caused mobile internet to be an essential part of younger society in Japan.

Differences in PC and mobile internet use in Japan

Focusing on how computer users access the internet can lead to valuable insights on the role of social media in Japanese society. In general, research has demonstrated that Japanese users use their PC for information services while communication and entertainment are usually handled through mobile platforms. There are several possible reasons for this. First of all, mobile and desktop devices are usually used at different locations. However, it is important to note that the mobile is still frequently used at home, meaning that being far from a desktop computer is not the main reason that people are using their mobiles. One reason for the prevalence of desktop use to gather information is the ease of use of a larger screen and keyboard. But the mobile phone has a stronger personal connection with the internet user, leading to a preference for this device when it comes to things like entertainment and communication.

Any mobile oriented marketing strategy in Japan should take into account the differences between mobile and desktop technology use in the consumer. Fixed internet devices are mostly used for information and job-related tasks. The wide availability of high speed internet and advanced smartphones has resulted in the use of mobile devices for almost all entertainment and communications related tasks.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

The Cloud has Become Mainstream in the Asia Pacific Region

Recent research from Cisco predicts that in the next three years the global cloud computing market will nearly triple in size. These estimates predict that a very large portion of this growth will occur in the Asia-Pacific region, which has reached maturity in only a few years. By 2016, more than half of businesses in the region will have the majority of IT infrastructure in a data center owned and operated by a third party, and nearly two thirds of businesses will use cloud storage and other cloud-based services as a part of their every day business.

These predictions reflect the prominence that cloud computing has gained in this particular market. In this article we take a look at how cloud computing has, for all intents and purposes, has gone mainstream in Asia.

No company can afford to not have a cloud strategy

Only a few years ago, the only cloud available in the Asia Pacific market was the public cloud. Today, there are numerous variants of public, private, and hybrid cloud services. The cloud is a part of everyday business, and no business can really afford to ignore it. Of course, the main benefits that the cloud brings to businesses is a reduction in technology investments, reduced costs, and improvement in a company’s responsiveness and agility. With these benefits, they now focus more on data and information management rather than on just maintaining a physical IT infrastructure.

A new inflection point in cloud technology adoption

Cloud providers that have been offering their services in the region for years have noticed an important shift in the market’s perception of this technology in recent years. This is because businesses are not only using the cloud for their operations, but it’s also serving as a way to extend and expand. The cloud allows companies to reach markets that were previously unreachable. As the cloud becomes an integral part in any growth strategy in the region, its transformative power gives businesses an important advantage over competitors. The high demand for cloud strategies for businesses has given rise to ‘Managed Service Providers’, who are specialized in providing services that can be implemented rapidly and with fewer expenses.

Companies are gradually gaining a more in-depth understanding of the different aspects of cloud computing. This means that they are gradually moving away from general, simplistic cloud strategies towards an approach that is more precise. In fact, the term “cloud” is much too vague for many clients. Because of this, it is recommended that cloud service providers in the Asia Pacific region (a market that has become much more mature in its use of cloud technology) use more specific terms when referring to the services they can provide for their clients. Rather than focusing on getting ‘the cloud’ for their company, managers are more interested in different pricing models and services. In a sense, this is similar to the widespread move to offshore workforces that occurred a decade ago — but now data and workloads are moving to a virtual location.

The concern for security versus the public cloud

Even though cloud technology brings reduced costs in the long term, making the move can be difficult for small businesses that may not have the means to support the short term expense. Because of this, it has been observed that the supposed concern for security often comes from small businesses that are not particularly eager to move to the cloud just yet. As cloud security continues to increase, the hybrid cloud will become more prevalent model among companies. In the end, the cloud model that is adopted will be related to the ownership and cost models rather than determined by the actual security of the cloud. In fact, most security concerns are not related to actual data safety as much as they are concerned with data ownership and government regulation.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

The Potential of Cloud Storage

To store large amounts of data requires enormous resources. This has made it impractical for many businesses to acquire the expensive servers and networks required, which also require maintenance and power. This is not only the case for small businesses. Governments and multinational companies are increasingly turning to the cloud in order to avoid the high costs of storing large amounts of information. Unfortunately, the rapid development of this technology has resulted in misconceptions about cloud technology’s security and reliability to stop many potential customers from adopting a cloud storage system.

Overcoming the paranoia

One of the main reasons many companies and governments hesitate when it comes to cloud technology is a concern for the security and safety of their data. This is because cloud storage requires a third-party provider who will host it on an off-site server network. The main advantage of cloud storage is that it allows customers to have easy access to their data from any location and from a range of different devices. This advantage is usually used to market cloud storage.

Cloud storage reduces customers’ reliance on their own servers, equipment, and devices. Machines can easily crash, break, or be stolen. They also need to be updated and upgraded, resulting in the loss of data. Because of this, a cloud service provider can ease the customer’s mind by making sure that equipment is up to date, in a safe location, and with the latest software updates. (You can read a little more about this over on GMO Cloud’s security measures.)

Despite the fact that cloud technology has advanced considerably since its inception, there is still unfounded paranoia about data security. Another common concern is related to data ownership due to the fact that data stored on the cloud can cross national borders and be subject to different laws.

This is especially true in the United States where the majority of cloud service providers are still located. This is because the Fourth Amendment, which protects United States citizens from unreasonable searches by law enforcement, has not been addressed by the Supreme Court when it comes to cloud or to email. The lack of clear guidelines on data privacy in the United States has become a concern for many.

It is important to note that the Asian market is quite different in this regard, with data privacy laws differing greatly in countries like Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong, where digital data privacy is well regulated and clear legislation exists.

Alleviating concerns

Since data security and reliability is one of the biggest concerns for customers, detailing the IT security measures taken is essential for a provider when alleviating customers’ fears. Google has published several white papers in recent years detailing its approach to IT security, demonstrating an outstanding strategy towards data security. Some aspects of data security that should be addressed by providers include protection against theft and hacking, preventing malware, monitoring system performance, and managing any incidents that may occur. Most modern cloud service providers have several layers of protection and only use essential components in order to reduce possible exploits.

Asia Pacific potential

The popularity of internet cafes and public wi-fi networks with high connection speeds makes the Asia Pacific market ideal for cloud storage services. As more individuals use cloud storage services and online apps for their personal tasks, it has become more practical for their places of employment and education to also adopt these services. The potential of cloud storage in the region is enormous. People today know that their money is safer in the bank; and likewise, people are increasingly starting to understand that data is often safer in the cloud than on their own home equipment.

Be Part of Our Cloud Conversation

Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.

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.