The cloud is no cure-all for poor nations

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

That bastion of journalism, the Huffington Post ran a story on cloud computing and the emerging markets. You pretty much know what these stories say before you read them: Cloud computing is ready-made for emerging countries, is the great equalizer, and all the rest. "This transformation [to the cloud] has great implications for places such as China, [South] 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 It will allow them to leapfrog outdated markets and take advantage of lower costs for building out infrastructure, as the cloud bulldozes all sorts of costly technology barriers." It’s not that simple.

Certainly, the ability to provide enterprise infrastructure and application services over the open Internet, per drink, is game-changing for many parts of the world that can’t afford to build a data center. However, many obstacles still remain, and some of these will take time and money to address…

The core problem is that the network infrastructure in most of these countries is lousy to nonexistent. A lack of access to broadband and data servers in developing countries limits the scope of cloud computing, as a United Nations report explains: "Many low-income countries rely on mobile broadband networks that are not ideal for cloud computing because of their low speed, and access to affordable broadband is especially poor in the least-developed countries."…

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