Emerging into the Cloud

Cloud computing has some tremendous social outcomes for emerging economies, not least in helping to bring education more rapidly to country areas normally poorly served with ICT education. The costs associated with putting servers, applications and support in village and in many cases, town schools is very high and frequently beyond the budget and priority of local government.

Vietnam is a great example. They already have an enviable 32% of the population connected to the internet. To put it in perspective that is 26.5 million users. With a population of 86 million with the majority living in countryside not well served by technology cities.

ICT education along with e-learning represents a unique challenge for countries such as Vietnam, how to connect thousands of remote schools at least cost as fast as possible. Cloud Computing is a real answer. Schools just need basic PC’s and can hook into central education applications cheaply and easily. http://vietnambusiness.asia/businesses-turn-to-cloud-computing/

Roll out of “digital education” becomes a real option to speed up and increase the pool of trained and educated staff. This is a strategy at the top of the Vietnamese government priorities for obvious reasons.

Many of Harvey Nash’s 4000 plus software engineers in Vietnam live in the cities but many have come from the countryside to study in the cities before getting their first job – in the cities. Over 80,000 graduates go through Universities each year and government targets reckon than 200,000 ICT students will be needed to meet 2015 growth in Vietnam’s ICT sector. With over 11% of GDP projected to come from the sector, the next years will be exciting with young people coming into the sector to meet resource demand. As the largest foreign software technology investor in Vietnam, we are enjoying the excitement.

November 3, 2011 09:36 AM | Permalink