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"Crowd Cloud" Brings Asia-Pacific Emerging Markets into the Cloud

Asaf Zamir

Asia-Pacific is at the forefront of the cloud revolution. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2015 – 2020, Asia Pacific is projected to generate 1.5 zettabytes of cloud traffic, or a trillion gigabytes. To put it into perspective, that’s equivalent to about 375 billion DVDs. Yet while developed APAC countries, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, are leading the way in cloud adoption, emerging markets in the region are trailing behind. The decentralized cloud – or the "Crowd Cloud" – will bring these markets into the 21st century by making the cloud accessible to all.

Growth of the Cloud in Asia-Pacific

Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region in terms of hyperscale data center locations, and is expected to grow more rapidly over the next five years. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company, announced its plans this year to open two more data centers in the region – one in Malaysia and another in Singapore. Meanwhile, Microsoft Asia Pacific has recorded triple-digit growth year-on-year for Azure in the first 10 months of 2016, providing cloud services to everything from IoT systems to monitor oyster farms to patient records for healthcare providers.

However, the very nature of centralized cloud services stymies growth in the cloud. These data centers are slow to build and costly to run. They are also vulnerable to cyber attacks, system failures and power outages. While Singapore and Hong Kong have made significant investments in the necessary cables, power and broadband for supporting the cloud, emerging APAC countries often lack the necessary infrastructure investment to support the cloud. For businesses, disruptions caused by systems failures can be costly; a recent outage of one of the largest cloud service providers in the US paralyzed a number of cloud-dependent businesses and cost S&P 500 companies $150 million USD.

The lack of competition between hyperscale cloud providers also means that costs are unnaturally high. The top 24 "hyperscale" companies operate over 300 data centers across the world, and account for almost 60 percent of cloud-hosted software services. By mid-2018, operational expenditure for cloud services will account for 80 percent of company’s IT budgets, according to Intel Security. This prices many businesses out of the cloud economy.

Crowd Cloud in an Emerging Market

The traditional model of centralized cloud services provided by a few hyperscale providers is outdated. To keep pace in the internet-based economy, Asia-Pacific emerging markets need to adopt a new model for the cloud: the "Crowd Cloud." Rather than storing and processing data in a centralized data center, the Crowd Cloud harnesses the unused processing power and data storage from millions of home and office computers worldwide. This will solve many of the issues in cloud scalability in Asia-Pacific emerging markets by bypassing the need for significant infrastructure investment in data centers, and creating a more secure and stable cloud network.

While there are already a number of decentralized solutions out there, these only provide solutions for a single vertical within the cloud – storage, computing (CPU), bandwidth, applications or payments – aimed towards niche markets, such as 3D graphics rendering or scientific research. Until now, there has not been a fully-integrated decentralized cloud service solution. The solution to this is through a decentralized infrastructure that utilizes a blockchain-based gateway to integrate between all these cloud components.

Within a new decentralized cloud ecosystem, it is necessary to have a standard cryptocurrency based on blockchain-Ethereum to govern exchanges automatically. By creating a running receipt of the cloud services used, it will enable the clearing and distributing of payments to Crowd Cloud providers. This could still include big players like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, alongside individual – anyone who is a part of the Crowd Cloud.

The introduction of decentralized cloud services will revolutionize how emerging markets access the cloud. Rather than relying on infrastructure which is slow, costly to build and prone to failure, the Crowd Cloud will provide instant access to high-power computer processing (CPU), data storage and other cloud services. This will ensure that these emerging markets are not left by the wayside as demand for online services continues to grow in Asia-Pacific.

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"Crowd Cloud" Brings Asia-Pacific Emerging Markets into the Cloud

Asaf Zamir

Asia-Pacific is at the forefront of the cloud revolution. According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2015 – 2020, Asia Pacific is projected to generate 1.5 zettabytes of cloud traffic, or a trillion gigabytes. To put it into perspective, that’s equivalent to about 375 billion DVDs. Yet while developed APAC countries, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, are leading the way in cloud adoption, emerging markets in the region are trailing behind. The decentralized cloud – or the "Crowd Cloud" – will bring these markets into the 21st century by making the cloud accessible to all.

Growth of the Cloud in Asia-Pacific

Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region in terms of hyperscale data center locations, and is expected to grow more rapidly over the next five years. Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company, announced its plans this year to open two more data centers in the region – one in Malaysia and another in Singapore. Meanwhile, Microsoft Asia Pacific has recorded triple-digit growth year-on-year for Azure in the first 10 months of 2016, providing cloud services to everything from IoT systems to monitor oyster farms to patient records for healthcare providers.

However, the very nature of centralized cloud services stymies growth in the cloud. These data centers are slow to build and costly to run. They are also vulnerable to cyber attacks, system failures and power outages. While Singapore and Hong Kong have made significant investments in the necessary cables, power and broadband for supporting the cloud, emerging APAC countries often lack the necessary infrastructure investment to support the cloud. For businesses, disruptions caused by systems failures can be costly; a recent outage of one of the largest cloud service providers in the US paralyzed a number of cloud-dependent businesses and cost S&P 500 companies $150 million USD.

The lack of competition between hyperscale cloud providers also means that costs are unnaturally high. The top 24 "hyperscale" companies operate over 300 data centers across the world, and account for almost 60 percent of cloud-hosted software services. By mid-2018, operational expenditure for cloud services will account for 80 percent of company’s IT budgets, according to Intel Security. This prices many businesses out of the cloud economy.

Crowd Cloud in an Emerging Market

The traditional model of centralized cloud services provided by a few hyperscale providers is outdated. To keep pace in the internet-based economy, Asia-Pacific emerging markets need to adopt a new model for the cloud: the "Crowd Cloud." Rather than storing and processing data in a centralized data center, the Crowd Cloud harnesses the unused processing power and data storage from millions of home and office computers worldwide. This will solve many of the issues in cloud scalability in Asia-Pacific emerging markets by bypassing the need for significant infrastructure investment in data centers, and creating a more secure and stable cloud network.

While there are already a number of decentralized solutions out there, these only provide solutions for a single vertical within the cloud – storage, computing (CPU), bandwidth, applications or payments – aimed towards niche markets, such as 3D graphics rendering or scientific research. Until now, there has not been a fully-integrated decentralized cloud service solution. The solution to this is through a decentralized infrastructure that utilizes a blockchain-based gateway to integrate between all these cloud components.

Within a new decentralized cloud ecosystem, it is necessary to have a standard cryptocurrency based on blockchain-Ethereum to govern exchanges automatically. By creating a running receipt of the cloud services used, it will enable the clearing and distributing of payments to Crowd Cloud providers. This could still include big players like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, alongside individual – anyone who is a part of the Crowd Cloud.

The introduction of decentralized cloud services will revolutionize how emerging markets access the cloud. Rather than relying on infrastructure which is slow, costly to build and prone to failure, the Crowd Cloud will provide instant access to high-power computer processing (CPU), data storage and other cloud services. This will ensure that these emerging markets are not left by the wayside as demand for online services continues to grow in Asia-Pacific.

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For fifteen years, observability lived downstream of everything else. Code shipped, something broke, an engineer went to the dashboards. The job was forensic. The pillars we built, such as logs, metrics, and traces, were designed for that role: tell a human what just happened, fast enough that they can make it stop. That role has quietly ended ...

Hybrid IT has become the standard operating model for enterprises — but that companies are still looking for the right hybrid IT mix, according to the 2026 State of the Data Center Report from CoreSite. After years of cloud migration and hybrid adoption, organizations are shifting their focus from deciding whether to use cloud, colocation or on-premises infrastructure to determining which workloads belong in each environment ...

Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

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Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...