Hong Kong plays catch-up on cloud computing
The city is gradually making headway in a technology that is changing the way business is done around the world
We all use the cloud. Every time you download an app or upload a photo to Facebook, Instagram or Weibo, you’re connecting to a network of servers. Perhaps you’re one of the 60 million who stream movies from Netflix, the 300 million users of file-sync company Dropbox, or part of the Facebook empire of 1.2 billion users.
However, smartphones are just the beginning; the cloud – or rather, cloud computing – is rapidly changing how business is done. The cloud may be the biggest transformative technology of our times, and Hong Kong itself is gradually making headway in becoming a cloud city.
The reason this city has been slower than some regions to embrace the cloud is partly because of the size of its finance industry – generally the most risk-averse – but mostly it’s down to availability.
“All organisations experience some level of nervousness when starting with public cloud,” says Michael Warrilow, research director at Gartner in Sydney, Australia.
Gartner’s recent survey of chief information officers in Hong Kong found that they rank the cloud a lower priority than the global average, much lower than in Southeast Asia, Australia/New Zealand and India.
There’s nothing shocking about how the cloud works if all you want to do is store files online. But now the cloud is about computing power and superfast data analysis, too.
