Promotion of Cloud Market
The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning held a cloud computing conference in Seoul on March 29. There, it announced new policy in order to increase the rate of use of cloud computing in Korea from 6.4% to 13% between last year and this year as well as to increase the number of Korean cloud computing firms from 353 to at least 500 during the same period. In addition, it is planning to increase the rate of use of private cloud computing tools by public institutions to at least 3% so that the size of the domestic cloud computing market can reach 1.1 trillion won.
In this context, the ministry sets up a cloud computing support center in Daegu City next month so public institutions can make better use of the tools provided by entities in the private sector. At the same time, it is going to allow enterprises in need of cloud computing in various industries to join the deregulation task force currently led by IT firms in the private sector.
The ministry is also focusing on the enhancement of the productivity of startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) by means of cloud computing. To this end, it is to provide cloud computing software development tools and infrastructure required for ICT startups in cooperation with the Centers for Creative Economy & Innovation across the country.
More measures are scheduled to become available to assist in South Korean cloud computing firms’ overseas business expansion, too. The measures are to cover Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). According to the ministry, South Korean firms stand a chance in the field of SaaS, which is the largest of the three in terms of market size, as it still has no dominant player unlike the era of packaged software led by a handful of companies such as Microsoft and Oracle. When it comes to IaaS, leading South Korean enterprises are capable of exporting their infrastructure to the regions including Southeast Asia.
These days, the focus of ICT utilization is shifting toward cloud computing. With the global network traffic soaring for the Internet of Things (IoT), big data collection and analysis and more mobile services than before, cloud computing is expected to account for 76% of the global data center traffic in 2018. Likewise, the size of the global cloud computing market is estimated to grow from US$83.6 billion to US$188.2 billion between 2014 and 2019.