There is a lot more room for improvement for Taiwan government and enterprises in entering cloud applications. Chairman of eASPNet, Jackson Wu, said that based on US and Europe market analysis, Taiwan is behind advanced countries for at least 4 years. However, something worth ruminating is that hardware products required for cloud computing are all from Taiwan. This shows that for Taiwan to go into cloud computing, all parties have to put in great effort. Hence, eASPNet is optimistic in the requirements of the government and SME market.
eASPNet was established in 2000, with internet data center (IDC) as its core business, and has since launched many diverse and unconventional cloud services, making data center not only a space for rental, but a service that save time and cost for companies. Being optimistic about the government and SME market is also one of its main reasons. With the clear direction of the government towards cloud procurement, the Industrial Development Bureau of the Ministry of Economic Affairs was delegated to form the Software Procurement Office (SOP), for the public to provide the government with more competitive cloud services innovatively. Hence, there are great business opportunities for eASPNet.
Currently, most government’s second-tier, third-tier, or even sub-tier units have their own data rooms. Without considering the hardware specification, there is definitely problem in managing and integrating them. On top of that, with hardware depreciation, it often gives rise to problems for the IT personnel. eASPNet’s HOSTING Public Cloud is able to resolve this problem by providing hardware and space to the government units, based on the concept of renting and provision for operating expense. The relevant personnel only have to take care of the maintenance and operation work of the “cloud applications”. They will also get to enjoy eASPNet’s highly recognized 24/7 continuous international information security protection. In addition, they can implement VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) based on their own requirements to centralize the data and enjoy high security, as well as enforce software usage and user restriction. As second-tier, third-tier or even sub-tier government units are similar to SME, their services are also suitable for small and medium enterprises.
Global trend analysis shows that based on resources, government and SMEs are more in need of the concept of public and hybrid clouds, as compared to large enterprises. Small and medium enterprises may host their systems on public clouds, while the government would have to consider their business content, and host their current main policies such as Open Data and smart city mainly on the public cloud. Important data like household administration should be hosted on the private cloud, and the relevant hardware and management service can be outsourced to facilitate development of more cloud services. Take the US government for example, by distributing between public and private clouds and outsourcing data centers, it only took two years for them to integrate 9,000 data centers of various sizes into 400 centers. Besides cutting down budget, it also improves the government’s cloud efficiency, and the smart government has also gained recognition from the public. This is the fundamental issue that Taiwan government has to consider when development cloud computing.
