According to a report that commissioned by the US-China Economic and Security Committee, the Chinese government is going to invest more than $1 billion into cloud computing development over the next few years.
The Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis (CIRA) has written the “Red Cloud Rising: Cloud Computing in China”, which predicted that this governmental investment would make China’s cloud industry expand to between $122 and $163 billion by 2015.
It also indicated that the low reliability and energy efficiency in domestic datacenters, lack of innovation in core chip development, and inadequate visualization supports are main challenges impeding the Chinese cloud industry growing.
It provided some new details about the relationship between the Chines military and intelligence services with China’s cloud computing development efforts, at the same time.
USCC Commissioner Larry Wortzel said the report warned that China-based cloud computing services might show critical security concerns for the United States, particularly if US companies are storing data on Chinese cloud networks.
Besides, things mainly differ China from the US is that “Chinese state guiding documents show no indication that technical requirements for Chinese government cloud computing requirements will ever be shared publicly”.
Moreover, it seems Chinese policies for cloud hosting standards create original innovation’ requirements for domestic sales of cloud computing technology to protect Chinese enterprises from foreign competition.
Although the Chinese government has imposed restrictions on foreign investment in value-added telecommunications services, US companies can still enter the Chinese market through joint cooperation in order to offer cloud services from datacenters in China.
Like the cooperation between Microsoft and 21Vianet, China’s datacenter service provider. That provides a typical way for US companies to access China’s cloud computing network.
The report said an alarming that “even small-scale requests for sensitive information may cause security concerns”. It reminded the public that Microsoft had provided the Chinese government with the “full source code for Microsoft Windows and other core products, which may have enabled the PLA and Chinese intelligence services to more effectively penetrate and exploit foreign systems and infrastructure” in the past time.