While cloud computing is beginning to take off in Asia, its adoption is being hampered by national regulations governing where data is stored, concerns about security and poor Internet connections.
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The Youth Olympic Games [in Singapore] in August presented organizers with a formidable, but temporary, computing hurdle: Manage 3,600 athletes, 20,000 volunteers and 370,000 spectators for two weeks.
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Rather than buy or lease the equipment necessary to run the event, organizers rented the required computer capacity from a data center run by Singapore Telecommunications.
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The Games were a showcase for cloud computing in Asia: software, data storage, networking and even computing equipment on tap — as much as a customer desired for only as long as needed.
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In past Olympic games, they had to buy these servers, said Bill Chang, an executive vice president at Singapore Telecommunications, and then after the Games all this equipment would be fire-sold away or given away.
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Mr. Chang said that by using cloud services, customers like the organizers of the Youth Olympic Games could save 60 percent to 80 percent of the cost of purchasing the equipment themselves.
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The research firm IDC estimates that the market for cloud computing in Asia outside Japan will grow to about $1.3 billion this year and will continue expanding at a rate of about 40 percent a year until 2014.
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That figure is just a splash in the estimated $68.3 billion that cloud computing will bring in globally in 2010, according to the research firm Gartner. And for every case of avid adoption, as in Singapore, there are other countries where acceptance is hindered by regulations, concerns about data security and poor Internet connections.
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What will drive adoption is broadband penetration, said Emilio Umeoka, president of Microsoft’s Asian operations in Singapore. If you don’t have the pipe, you can’t get onto the cloud.
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For potential customers, the…