Cloud Computing: Emerging Markets will likely Leapfrog Developed Nations in Cloud Adoption

There’s been tremendous growth in cloud computing over the last few years in the US and Europe.  But that growth may be dwarfed by the cloud growth that’s expected to occur in emerging markets.  IDC is forecasting 37 percent annual growth in emerging markets through 2017, nearly twice the growth rate seen in developed markets.

Despite the growth by emerging nations in the area of cloud computing, those countries are still far behind developed countries.  The 2013 Business Software Alliance (BSA) survey found that the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are all behind in their implementation of policies that would incentivize adoption of the cloud.  Of the 24 countries surveyed, the BRICS nations rank near the bottom.  But it looks like this situation is about to rapidly change dramatically.

Ben Uretsky, Founder and CEO of DigitalOcean, writes for the Huffington Post that cloud computing “has great implications for places such as China, Korea, Hong-Kong, Brazil, Russia, and India. It will allow them to leapfrog outdated markets and take advantage of lower costs for building out infrastructure, as the cloud bulldozes all sorts of costly technology barriers. Countries who have this foresight and are willing to embrace cloud virtualization will put themselves in a position to exploit these opportunities; individuals and small businesses will have access to enterprise-quality hardware that will drastically increase productivity and agility.”

Manjula Talreja, Cisco Vice President, writes on the Cisco Company Blog, that “emerging economies … are more upbeat about cloud and the impact it can drive for their companies. They are investing heavily in what they see as the transformational potential of cloud. For these emerging economies, the number-one cloud adoption driver is increasing business productivity and agility.”

Leo Hart, Data Center Services Product Manager at NetStandard, writes that “for nations like Brazil, China and India, the cloud works to remove barriers against costly technology that would have been difficult for small businesses to obtain in the past. This opens up enormous opportunities for new services and products in these countries to be developed. Emerging markets can now have the potential to compete as global leaders in innovation.”

Robert Holleyman, BSA President and CEO , said that “we’re seeing a leapfrog effect. A lot of recent adopters of computers and information technology are jumping straight to the cloud.  If you live in a developing economy and use a computer, then, likely as not, you also use cloud computing services at least some of the time for email, word processing, document or photo storage, or other things — although you might not understand those services to be ‘cloud computing.’”