A group of 11 companies representing the computing, software, hardware and service provider communities, including Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ), have pooled their resources to form the Asia Cloud Computing Association (Asia Cloud).
Asia Pacific is a sound target for cloud computing. According to IDC Research, the cloud computing market in Asia outside Japan will grow to about $1.3 billion in 2010 and then expand at about 40 percent a year up until 2014. Meanwhile, Japan's cloud computing market will grow to $29.2 billion in 2015.
Although Asia is a ripe cloud computing market, its growth has been challenged by a host of security concerns, compliance and regulatory mandates.
Sundi Balu, Asia Cloud Chairman and REACH Chief Information Officer, said the organization wants to help the region's organizations overcome these issues by enabling members of the cloud computing ecosystem to "collaborate on issues specific to Asia and enable faster and more efficient adoption of cloud computing."
To achieve its goals, Asia Cloud will examine which established global cloud standards could be adapted to the region. Some of the initial issues Asia Cloud working groups will tackle include public policy and regulatory issues, security, taxonomy, and carrier-grade applications. Next year Asia Cloud plans to publish best practices and a cloud readiness index that both end users and vendors can follow.
For more:
- see the release
Related articles:
Orange Business, Cisco, EMC VMware strike cloud computing pact
IBM targets telcos with carrier-grade cloud services platform