Over the last year I've been saying one of the biggest opportunities in cloud computing is in the creation of "regional" compute clouds. These geo-specific sources of capacity which I described in a previous post called "The Geopolitical Cloud" address several fundimental problems with the use of remote infrastructure including network latency, security and accountablity. I believe that governmental agencies and telecoms are in an ideal position to take advantage of this transition to a network based software environment.
For quick refresher, Over the last few months there has been a lot of discuss here in Canada on the topic of hosting data outside of the country (specifically in the US). The topic has recently reached a breaking point when the Canadian government declared that government IT workers not use network services that are operating within United States borders. The reasoning is that Canadian data stored on those servers could conceivably be negatively impacted by the repercussions of the Patriot Act.
Well, now businesses in Singapore and southern Asia will soon be able to draw on their very own commercial, pay-per-use cloud-computing service, as part of a government-driven initiative to promote hosted cloud and grid applications for purposes beyond research.
The three service-provider groups appointed by Singapore's Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) will activate on-demand access to computing power and software applications, as well as storage and archiving, from 1 November, according to a ZDNet Asia article.
The article goes on to say: the new grid-computing platform, Alatum, will go to market with 20 partners, including Citrix, Haley, IBM WebSphere Commerce, Microsoft, Red Hat and Salesforce.com. (And Enomaly, waiting for a response from their management)
Apart from on-demand applications, such as CRM (customer-relationship management), e-commerce, ERP (enterprise resource planning) and business management, the partnership will also offer 2,400 cores and 16TB of storage as an on demand service.
More details > http://www.alatum.com.sg
