By Kim Yoo-chul
For aging societies, including South Korea’s, cloud computing may play a pivotal role as the latest trend to change the daily lives of senior citizens and to secure more business opportunities.
Michael Thatcher, a regional technology officer at Microsoft (MS) for Asia made this point in an interview with The Korea Times, adding that the nation will emerge as a leader in the promising cloud computing business thanks to its high broadband connectivity and unrivaled Internet literacy.
Cloud computing refers to Internet-enabled processing where shared resources, software and information are offered to computers on demand over the Web, instead of dedicated ones.
It is like using computing resources and software as much as a corporation or individual clients would want just as they use tap water. Hence, the costs are calculated on a pay-as-you-go format.
``It’s not diplomatic. MS is seeing huge potential in cloud computing, here. Internet connectivity is available everywhere across the country and I think that it’s quite interesting how the elderly start leveraging technology in their lives,’’ he said.
In fact, MS is turning its eyes to the elderly as the U.S.-based technology giant has offered computing education to them through a variety of programs. Thatcher said that the firm made further progress in programs to help aged Koreans.
As of the end of July, Koreans aged 65 or older accounted for 11 percent of the total population of around 50 million people.
The figure is rising fast and it is likely Korea will be classified as an ``aged society’’ by the late 2010s.
The accelerated march to being an aged society is raising concerns on how to cope with increasing healthcare and welfare expenses. In this climate, Thatcher says cloud computing systems might be the solution.
``Cloud computing promises huge benefits for healthcare. These could include improved patient care, better health for the overall population providers serve, and cloud computing can help do all of this in a cost-effective way,’’ he said.
Thatcher said MS has seen a ``substantial increase’’ in awareness of its cloud strategies and the company’s newfound ``all-in’’ cloud strategy creates a tendency to incorporate more and more online functionality into its offerings.
The industry-wide transition to cloud computing is expected to dominate much of the technology world with data centers springing up wherever energy is provided at inexpensive prices.
``From a consumer’s standpoint, MS has been using many types of cloud applications for years. Much of today’s e-mailing and chatting are already transacted through the cloud via hotmail or gmail. The results, so far, have been satisfactory,’’ the executive said. ``We’ve made a clear choice that this is a business.’’
Recently, the issue of how security services are provisioned and delivered has emerged as organizations are briskly moving away from virtualized servers in the data center to private cloud computing environments.
By pointing out ``privacy’’ and ``security’’ as the top two words for security-related matters, Thatcher said software is currently being maintained and secured by MS and he is positive that the company guarantees 99.9 percent reliability.
He said that the company works in a responsible way to prevent any leak of personal information and has been checking the status of its cloud computing users.
U-Prove is one of the system MS boasts of. The system employs cryptographic technology, making possible the issuance and presentation of cryptographically protected claims in a matter involving multi-party security.
When asked of the impact of the ongoing competition on its rivals such as Google, Amazon and even Apple in various cloud computing-related areas, Thatcher said Microsoft has already differentiated itself as an authoritative player in the ``public cloud computing market.’’.
While MS claims a sizable number of users for its cloud-based services _ Windows Azure has around 10,000 users and some 20 percent of the virtualization market _ those steps have yet to contribute significantly to the company’s bottom lines, still mostly affected by its traditional on-premises offerings.
MS hopes to further expand its business partnerships with Korean companies particularly telecom operators like SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus, which are injecting more of their key resources to strengthening cloud computing businesses as they become next-generation growth drivers.
The MS executive said his firm has been maintaining healthy partnerships with Korean entities interested in the potential-loaded segment even though he declined to specify their names.