The Cloud Over Asia

By Dawn Altman

Asia’s the most populated continent in the world, and it’s where a large number of our technologies come from. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, that virtualization and cloud technology demand is growing in Asian countries. With plentiful local access to many new mobile technologies and transit systems that allow people to travel easily, access to the cloud is becoming increasingly important not only for pleasure, but for business as well. There are many reasons for the boom, and as Asia continues to grow in both population and in the world economy, everyone can only expect the demand for the cloud to continue to grow.

Need for the cloud

Asia has been the unfortunate recipient of many natural disasters in the past several years. Earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, as well as flooding in Thailand and other countries, have raised the need for cloud backup and virtualization for enterprises. Companies that store data onsite are often ravaged when natural disasters hit. As servers and computers are destroyed in floods or earthquakes, hard drives containing valuable business-related information are lost. The cloud, however, offers a backup plan for companies. Using backup software, businesses can save backup images of their entire servers on regulated time frames, and can save them to a dedicated server somewhere offsite (onto the cloud). In order to further prepare for natural disasters, more businesses are focusing on cloud backup and virtualization of their data and software.

Robust Storage

Because of the immense population in Asia and the boom-like nature of the demand for cloud and virtualized interfaces, building a major infrastructure from scratch could prove to be a challenge. When dealing with such large numbers of people and businesses, larger amounts of storage are also needed as well as quick retrieval options. Even if server space is stored outside of Asia, the sheer amount of space required will have an effect on retrieval times. In many cases, time is an extremely valuable commodity. Those who live and work in Asia and who are planning to build a major cloud infrastructure may initially find themselves looking to many locations outside of the continent to provide thorough data protection and quick recovery.

High Mobility

Another force driving the boom is the incredible number of mobile devices being used in Asia. Virtualization will allow the users of those devices to keep local storage free while still granting the ability to use specific software they want or need. Yet even as populated as Asia is, there are still large chunks of the country that don’t have a massive data infrastructure in place. This provides a unique issue to those building customized cloud servers. With the increasing use of mobile technology allowing users to work (or play) from anywhere in the country, anyone attempting to put in place a framework needs to take into account the anywhere, anytime nature of the cloud, with a distinct focus on anywhere. This big push toward mobile could lead to a major expansion of mobile network infrastructure throughout Asia, which will mean increased access to the cloud and an even higher demand for remote storage options.

About the author: Dawn Altnam lives and works in the Midwest, and she enjoys following the business tech world. After furthering her education, she has spent some time researching her interests and blogging of her discoveries often. Follow her on Twitter! @DawnAltnam