The island-nation of Singapore, located in the southwest of the ASEAN region, competes with Hong Kong more than 1,500 miles to the northeast for business and attention. It is now also competing with the Chinese special administrative region (SAR) as an emerging cloud-computing center.

A recent development comes from Citic Telecom International CPC Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company that’s launched what it calls a SmartCloud center in Singapore. The center joins similar facilities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

The company expects cloud services to grow to 20-25% of its overall business within three years, according to a statement from company CEO Stephen Ho.

This is a complex facility, belying any belief one might have that cloud is simple. It incorporates technology from Dell, Riverbed, VMware, and HP (which is adding security management into the mix).

The Riverbed technology, designed to optimize performance, is a key aspect of Citic’s implementation. A local Riverbed spokesperson said the company’s technology will address “the vagaries of the Internet” with the idea of maximizing QoS (quality-of-service) issues.

Citic says Singapore will be its “communications hub” for Southeast Asia, and also says it will extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the near future.

The Singaporean government has been an active supporter of cloud computing, encouraging investment and developing an aggressive government cloud program that provides XaaS cloud services to local businesses. A non-profit organization in Hong Kong called Asia Cloud developed a “Cloud Readiness Index” last year that aggregated several factors into an Asian ranking. Hong Kong slightly topped Singapore, followed closely by Australia.

I prefer to be in Manila for many reasons, and think there is potential for any of the large-to-massive cities of the region – Manila, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok – to emerge more fully. Sydney and Melbourne are present in regional-hub discussions as well.

With Singapore as its communication hub for the ASEAN region, Citic plans to extend its presence to Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines in the near future. Apart from Singapore, it has deployed more than 50 points of presence already in the Greater China and Asia Pacific, including Malaysia, Vietnam and Australia.

Several network-security vendors are also involved with the project, including Certes Networks, Juniper Networks, Fortinet, and McAfee. The goal is to get Citic’s regional centers to work as disaster-recovery centers for one another.

Note that the technology vendors named here are all US Companies. Is anybody in Washington listening when we plead for them to pay more attention to the great and vast US cloud-computing innovation culture?

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Convincing your clients to add cloud-based backups to their business continuity plan is often thwarted by a fear of losing control over offsite data. With an army of StorageCraft solutions empowering you to quickly access your data in multiple ways, you can easily convince your clients to add this wise level of protection.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, Kimber Barton, Principle Sales Engineer at StorageCraft, will walks through offsite backup storage options, including StorageCraft Cloud Services, and the StorageCraft technologies that give you the power to maintain ultimate control over your offsite data.

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ISF urges business to use Big Data Analytics for security purposes – in a recent ISF study, they had six key findings as well a large number of recommendations. “The key recommendation is for organizations to exploit their existing data analytics capabilities, to identify security areas that can be addressed, and to start small with a limited pilot project.”
Revised Cybersecurity Act of 2012 Again Goes Before US Senate – the re-worked Cybersecurity Act of 2012 might be able to pass through the senate. The earlier bill did not pass due to issues with digital privacy and personal freedoms. “This revised legislation would establish a robust public‐private partnership to improve the cybersecurity of our nation’s most critical infrastructure, which is mostly owned by the private sector,
as stated by the bill.

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«We released our new high performance cloud platform at Cloud Expo and we’ve had terrific uptake of that release,» observed Peter Berg, VP Sales & Marketing at ServerCentral in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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Amazon Cloud Player just got a major content and feature update, the company announced today, while unveiling new music licensing agreements with Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and 150 other partners. As you may know, Cloud Player is a freemium platform that help users access their music in the cloud. The free version lets customers all MP3 music purchased at Amazon, plus import up to 250 songs from their computer to Cloud Player. As for the Premium version, it allows customers to import and store up to 250,000 songs in Cloud Player for an annual fee of $24.99 – which makes it a direct competitor to Apple’s iTunes Match.

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“Panzura is essentially a global file system, which spans across multiple geos, so it’s a geographically dispersed file system,” explained Ranajit Nevatia, VP of Marketing at Panzura, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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«What comes first is the excitement around a new technology bursts, and what comes in next – the testing and the quality,» noted Wayne Ariola, VP of Strategy and Corporate Development at Parasoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11-14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5-8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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We have a fascinating show today, because we are going to learn about how a prominent European IT-enabled business services provider, Steria, is leveraging cloud services to manage complexity and deliver better services to customers.
Paul, is that what you are finding — that the cloud model is starting to impact this whole notion of effective performance across services in total?
This is a conversation I’ve been having a lot lately. The word «cloud» gets thrown around a lot, but when I drill into the topic, I find that customers are really talking about services and integrating different services, whether they are on-premises, in the public cloud arena, or even that gray land, which is called outsourcing.

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“Today we announced the availability of our HPC cloud product, which is the next part of our cloud roadmap,” stated Robert Miggins, Senior VP, Business Development at PEER 1 Hosting, in this SYS-CON.tv interview with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan at the 10th International Cloud Expo, held June 11–14, 2012, at the Javits Center in New York City.
Cloud Expo 2012 Silicon Valley, November 5–8, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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We are witnessing the large-scale industrialization of the data center, owned and operated by the ICT operators who specialize in that task, with security technologies in the hands of the end user to remove any need to trust their human operators.
The traditional “protect the perimeter” model of enterprise data security, one where layers of security are added around enterprise data, access to which is limited to trusted insiders, clearly has challenges in a cloud model when outsiders (the folks running the cloud) have access to all your data and can monitor everything that you do in their environment.
The solution is not, as some would tell you in the security profession, better certification of cloud providers and external vetting of the human operators. Certification has a role but the ultimate answer will be the invention of technologies that completely remove the need for trusting the human operators.

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