The Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) is a non-profit organization which fosters collaboration and innovation in Asia to drive adoption of cloud computing regionally. Some of its members include Alcatel-Lucent, Asia Policy Partners, AT&T, Cisco Systems, CITIC CPC, CSA, EMC Corporation, Equinix, Global Yellow Pages, Hiring Solutions, Huawei, Internet Society, Microsoft, NetApp and Rackspace, among others.

Per Dahlberg, co-founder and CEO of the group, said compared with other cloud computing/IT organizations which are mainly focused on a country specific market or don’t give Asia much consideration, the ACCA focuses on the cloud computing market across Asia as a whole, while also paying attention to its global role.

“We engage actively with hardware and software developers, carriers, enterprise users, policy makers and researchers to help understand Asia’s cloud computing market, public policies and regulatory regimes, among other things,” Dahlberg said.

At present, Huawei is the only member of ACCA from mainland China, yet Dahlberg told Focus the ACCA wants to attract more Chinese players to join the organization. 

“We would expect that the three state-owned telecommunication players (China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile), internet giant Baidu and ZTE, among others, should be interested in coming on board in the near future,” Dahlberg said.

To facilitate this process, ACCA is discussing a series of lectures together with the Hong Kong University. The series will focus on data center and cloud computing issues not only within China but also for China in a regional and global context.

“This will help enterprises, government departments and research institutions from the mainland to better understand what the ACCA are doing and to attract more mainland IT companies and organizations to join us,” Dahlberg said.

The Origins of the ACCA
The ACCA was formed against the backdrop of rapidly growing cloud computing markets both globally and regionally.

The cloud computing market is expected to grow almost 20% in 2013 to be worth US$109bn, according to research firm Gartner, and Business Process-as-a-Service (BPaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) are expected to dominate this market, with Infrastructure-as-a -Service (IaaS) also gaining momentum.

Another research firm IDC predicts that revenues from cloud innovation could reach as much as US$1.1 trillion a year by 2015.

Dahlberg believes a healthy percentage of this growth will be seen in the Asia Pacific region. He said regions under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) especially have been seeing fast growth in the ICT industry, employing 11.7m people and contributing US$32bn - or 3% - to the region’s gross domestic product (GDP). “Cloud computing is expected to create 14m jobs globally, 10m of these in Asia 2011-2015,” Dahlberg said.

The Asia cloud computing market is not immune from challenges, however. Dahlberg said market confusion still exists around what cloud computing actually is and there is still discrepancies around cloud readiness in APAC countries. Data security and privacy issues, service levels and licensing concerns also pose barriers to the adoption of cloud computing technologies throughout Asia.

“Compared with Europe or the US, Asia is a much more diversified cloud computing market,” Dahlberg said. “There are very mature markets such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, and there are also rapidly developing markets such as China and India. All those markets are quite different in terms of infrastructure base, regulatory regimes and data sovereignty policies, among other things.

“Such diversity means both opportunities and challenges, and that is the very reason that ACCA came into being.”

Achievements and plans
Dahlberg said the ACCA has already provided industry thought leadership, creating the roadmaps for cloud computing in Asia and on a global sense, as well as removing key obstacles to cloud adoption.

One of the most notable achievements is the rollout of the Cloud Readiness Index, an annual study of Asia-Pacific economies’ preparedness for cloud computing. The Index examines 14 countries and markets using ten different measures, including regulatory issues such as data protection, infrastructural issues such as broadband and the wider business and legislative environment.

The Index shows that Japan is the most ready for cloud computing adoption due to its excellent connectivity and freedom of information, followed in order by South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

China, though a very promising cloud computing market, ranked only 10^th on the Index due to its poor connectivity, weakness in data protection and questions of data sovereignty, an unreliable power grid and power policies, among other things.

“In preparing the Cloud Readiness Index, the ACCA primarily relied on published information sources, supplemented by our own research,” Dahlberg said.

Apart from the Cloud Readiness Index, the ACCA launched the online version of its Cloud Assessment Tool (CAT), which provides a vendor–neutral framework that allows IT users to measure their requirements against vendor offerings.

The CAT framework is organized into eight performance categories spread over four service tiers, mapping operational parameter values against key criteria. “This helps end-users to define and prioritize their own requirements and assess service providers’ offers quickly and objectively,” Dahlberg said.

“We are currently busy with the Data Sovereignty Index project, which aims to demystify data sovereignty and provide best practice recommendations and benchmarking against a model regime. We launch this project with the aim to provide further clarity about data sovereignty and compliance issues of different Asian countries. Findings will be available to members later this year.”

Dahlberg also told Focus the ACCA is engaged with another project called the SME Cloud Index.  This is a comparative index of Asian countries’ small and medium-size enterprise (SME) size, attractiveness and readiness for cloud computing adoption. “After launching the Cloud Assessment Tool for large corporations, we felt there was also a need to create a well adaptive cloud computing assessment tool for the SME sector, which is such an important contributor to GDP growth worldwide. We are expecting to get the index done in the next few months.”