By Carol Ko and Sheila Lam 07-Feb-2012
Five telco operators teamed up with Oracle and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to form the Asia Pacific Cloud Alliance, which aims at driving private cloud adoption in the region and developing a framework for cloud interoperability standards.
Being the first industry alliance formed by telco operators, the founding members of Asia Pacific Cloud Alliance (APCA) include Hutchison Global Communications (HGC), VADS (a Telekom Malaysia-owned company), LG CNS, Telstra, AAPT and Oracle, which provides Exadata and Exalogic solutions to the founding members.
Hong Kong-based HGC will serve as the main regional hub for cloud services into China, while Malaysia-based VADS will serve as the main regional hub into ASEAN. LG CNS will provide network coverage up North in South Korea, while Telstra and AAPT will cover Australia and New Zealand.
PwC will act as an independent advisory body to foster communications between APCA’s founding members, to provide cloud-related advisory services for enterprises in the region, and to help develop the "best practices" business framework for interoperability standards.
Asia Pacific Cloud Alliance will develop cloud interoperability standards around security and privacy, quality of service and service level agreement, as well as mitigate service provider lock-in, according to AAPT CEO David Yuile. “These standards do not all exist today. PwC will help formulate these standards in different markets,” added Greg Unsworth, Asia Pacific technology industry leader, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.
"There is currently no standards body in the [Asia Pacific] region. The alliance will act as a platform to start the conversation and hopefully over the period, to provide standards or offering across the region," said Steve Au-Yeung, executive vice president, Oracle Asia Pacific.
The Asia Pacific Cloud Alliance also aims to resolve common issues around cloud computing, including data security and privacy/sovereignty, performance reliability and local support, ability to modify application/ integrate with internal IT, interoperability across clouds, and regulatory compliance in different countries.
To do so, the Asia Pacific Cloud Alliance will pull together the different expertise of the founding members, which comprises carrier-grade infrastructure and a business regulatory framework. Through a virtual private cloud, the Alliance aims to facilitate partnerships among telecommunications carriers and ICT services providers in Asia Pacific.
With an existing infrastructure such as optical-fiber networks and data center facilities, the Asia Pacific Cloud Alliance will offer business-ready solutions to address threats from disasters, provide business analytics and affordable SMB (small and medium businesses) service packs, as well as industry-specific solutions such as for the education, healthcare and retail industries.
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