The Association of Southeast Asian Nations – known as ASEAN – comprises 10 nations with a combined population of 600 million people and total GDP of $3.5 trillion.

The population is about twice that of the US, with a total economy twice that of India.

ASEAN is headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia, but strives to be unstintingly fair in the distribution of its events, programs, and emphasis. The ASEAN region covers a range of language, religion, governments, and culture that is breathtaking in its scope.

Yet its members’ national leaders seem uniform in their commitment to regional cooperation and peace. This can put the association at occasional odds with Western powers when it treats Myanmar (former Burma) with the same consideration as, say, the Philippines.

We’ve been able to produce rankings for eight of the ASEAN nations in our research: Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. We’re missingly only Brunei and Myanmar at this point.

Leaders
Among the ASEAN nations, Vietnam ranks among the Top 10 in our overall global rankings, Singapore among the Top 25. They are joined by the Philippines in our Top 25 global measuremnt of raw potential.

In our “Goldilocks” rankings, which seek to determine the Top 25 ICT environments that are growing just right (neither too hot nor too cold), we find Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand.

So we’ve found positive measures in each of the eight countries we’ve researched. There are clear, often severe challenges in most of these places, of course. We never want to minimize the difficulty of addressing those challenges.

Wide Range
There is also a wide range of ICT development throughout the region, from Singapore’s 30Mb average bandwidth to less than 2Mb in the Philippines, and Singapore’s 75% Internet connectivity to Cambodia’s 3.1%. Average income ranges across 1.7 magnitudes, as does the relative cost of living.

With our relative approach to analyzing ICT environments, we find that there are hopeful signs throughout the ASEAN nations. For example, cloud computing is a big topic in the social- and mobile-driven cultures of the Philippines and Indonesia; in Laos, where abundant hydroelectric power is drawing investment in a place ripe for new datacenters; in cyber-centric Malaysia; etc.

SMAC
In response, I’m working with local firms throughout the ASEAN region to develop a SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud) Seminar Series in 2014. We’ve already scheduled our first event in Manila on April 24.

I’m also working to link our ASEAN series with a major cloud event in Beijing March 27-28, and an emerging user-driven Cloud APAC organization. Tweet me for details!

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Enterprises that rely heavily on fax, view regulatory compliance as a major business component. Non-compliance issues that arise from security breaches and other forms of information leakage often result in substantial regulatory penalties, both civil and criminal. As government regulations regarding information security evolve, the need to align fax systems with compliance mandates becomes increasingly critical.
This whitepaper addresses regulatory compliance within fax communications and the steps enterprises can take to strategically leverage cloud technology in order to avoid security breaches and compliance risks.

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It’s hard to read or listen to the news without hearing concerns about protecting sensitive data. Whether it is providing security for payment card/banking information or maintaining privacy from cyber surveillance – governmental and otherwise.
Edward Snowden was back in the news last week when The Guardian revealed that the GCHQ and NSA targeted charities, Germany, the Israeli PM and EU chief on their surveillance list. These ongoing revelations have many organizations concerned about the privacy of customer data and other sensitive business information being put in the cloud.
As I wrote on our PerspecSys blog last week, the implications of the massive data breach at Target could be enormous. Information associated with the crime is still coming out including Fox News reporting yesterday that credit and debit card accounts stolen have reportedly flooded underground black markets.

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It’s hard to read or listen to the news without hearing concerns about protecting sensitive data. Whether it is providing security for payment card/banking information or maintaining privacy from cyber surveillance – governmental and otherwise.
Edward Snowden was back in the news last week when The Guardian revealed that the GCHQ and NSA targeted charities, Germany, the Israeli PM and EU chief on their surveillance list. These ongoing revelations have many organizations concerned about the privacy of customer data and other sensitive business information being put in the cloud.
As I wrote on our PerspecSys blog last week, the implications of the massive data breach at Target could be enormous. Information associated with the crime is still coming out including Fox News reporting yesterday that credit and debit card accounts stolen have reportedly flooded underground black markets.

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“AccelOps provides analytics driven IT operations management for cloud, virtualize infrastructure, and client-server environments,” explained Flint Brenton, president and CEO of AccelOps, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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South Sudan is the world’s newest nation, created after a violent struggle, and one that now appears primed for more violence. Once again, the baser instincts of us human beings may trump our nobler nature.

More than 2 milliion people died in South Sudan’s fight for independence, an astonishing number. Imagine half a million people murdered in New York Ciry or London and you get the idea of the scale of this slaughter.

Yet the area is far from hopeless when it comes to ICT. We have not yet been able to break out specific figures for South Sudan, but we were able to include Sudan in our research with relevant figures before the nation broke into its present two pieces.

Our research encompasses 102 nations, and strives to determine relative progress with ICT infrastructure. We integrate several socio-economic and technology measures into our unique algorithms. Our approach gives developing nations of the world a chance to be compared on a “pound-for-pound” basis with developed nations, and can uncover diamonds in the rough in developing regions.

Sudan and South Sudan may be among those diamonds in the rough. Although Sudan finihsed 95th out of the 102 nations we survey with the information we were able to use, it showed a lot more promise when we focused more heavily on technology measures and less on socio-economic measures.

In fact, Sudan cracked our Global Top 20 in terms of potential, mostly due to having broader Internet access than expected – higher than better-known emerging starts Ghana and Senegal, for example.

We understand the danger of minimizing the socio-economic factors. After all, if a nation is simply too dangerous to visit, let alone consider as a place to invest, why even mention it?

Our approach has a heavy measure of caveat emptor – we assume that serious people have a good grasp of the risks involved in traveling to and doing businesss in any nation – and we don’t try to predict short-term economic performance. We do believe that over the long term, those countries with the most dynamic relative ICT infrastructures will be successful, as will those who invest in them.

Sudan and South Sudan have a combined population of about 48 million people, and sit in proximity to emerging East Africa, to Egypt, and to the Gulf states. If only political leaders there could lift their heads, stop focusing on the perceived enemies at hand, and take a longer view, they could truly improve the lives of their people. Our research says this, I say this, and I can hope for the day when it’s safe for me to visit Joba and environs.

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South Sudan is the world’s newest nation, created after a violent struggle, and one that now appears primed for more violence. Once again, the baser instincts of us human beings may trump our nobler nature.

More than 2 milliion people died in South Sudan’s fight for independence, an astonishing number. Imagine half a million people murdered in New York Ciry or London and you get the idea of the scale of this slaughter.

Yet the area is far from hopeless when it comes to ICT. We have not yet been able to break out specific figures for South Sudan, but we were able to include Sudan in our research with relevant figures before the nation broke into its present two pieces.

Our research encompasses 102 nations, and strives to determine relative progress with ICT infrastructure. We integrate several socio-economic and technology measures into our unique algorithms. Our approach gives developing nations of the world a chance to be compared on a “pound-for-pound” basis with developed nations, and can uncover diamonds in the rough in developing regions.

Sudan and South Sudan may be among those diamonds in the rough. Although Sudan finihsed 95th out of the 102 nations we survey with the information we were able to use, it showed a lot more promise when we focused more heavily on technology measures and less on socio-economic measures.

In fact, Sudan cracked our Global Top 20 in terms of potential, mostly due to having broader Internet access than expected – higher than better-known emerging starts Ghana and Senegal, for example.

We understand the danger of minimizing the socio-economic factors. After all, if a nation is simply too dangerous to visit, let alone consider as a place to invest, why even mention it?

Our approach has a heavy measure of caveat emptor – we assume that serious people have a good grasp of the risks involved in traveling to and doing businesss in any nation – and we don’t try to predict short-term economic performance. We do believe that over the long term, those countries with the most dynamic relative ICT infrastructures will be successful, as will those who invest in them.

Sudan and South Sudan have a combined population of about 48 million people, and sit in proximity to emerging East Africa, to Egypt, and to the Gulf states. If only political leaders there could lift their heads, stop focusing on the perceived enemies at hand, and take a longer view, they could truly improve the lives of their people. Our research says this, I say this, and I can hope for the day when it’s safe for me to visit Joba and environs.

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IT organizations face a growing demand for faster innovation and new applications to support emerging opportunities in social, mobile, growth markets, Big Data analytics, mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and more. This is great news because it shows that IT continues to be a key stakeholder in delivering business service innovation. However, it also means that IT must deliver new innovation despite flat budgets, while maintaining existing services that grow more complex every day.
This is where cloud computing can help to deliver business outcomes, especially if you look beyond just one or two cloud providers, to the almost limitless variety of interconnected and intermediated cloud services – what I call the ‘cloud of clouds’. This is true especially for foundational capabilities – like compute infrastructure, data storage, content delivery, or financial management; and cloud-native services like social media, mobile interfaces, or Big Data analytics. Indeed, it makes little sense today to waste time and resources to rewrite existing code every time you need one of these foundational or cloud-native services. By leveraging the cloud of clouds, developers can instead focus on writing new and unique application code that delivers the competitive advantage the business needs.

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“In a nutshell we provide a cloud software delivery and management platform. When you look at Infrastructure as a Service you can boil it down to two things: self-service and automation,” explained James Weir, CTO and co-founder of UShareSoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at the 13th International Cloud Expo®, held Nov 4–7, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Cloud Expo® 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Cloud industry players in the world.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that TMCnet has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 14th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 10–12, 2014, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, and the 15th International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC) is the world’s leading business to business and integrated marketing media company, servicing niche markets within the communications and technology industries.

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