State Council Issues Opinions on Cloud Computing Innovation

The State Council has recently issued a set of opinions on the innovative development of cloud computing and the fostering of new business forms.

The opinions envisage, by 2017, the adoption of cloud computing in key areas and creation of a basically sound industrial chain. As a result, a strongly secure cloud development pattern driven by collaboration in service, technology and management innovations will be initially formed, spurring the rapid growth of the relevant industries.

Significant increase in service ability. A number of key cloud-computing enterprises with strong innovation ability will be established, providing a wide variety of services targeted at individual clients and small and micro businesses. Cloud computing systems integration capabilities will be significantly improved.

Significant increase in innovative ability. Original innovation and radical innovation will be strengthened to give breakthrough to a number of core technologies and products including cloud computing platform software, exabyte (or EB, about 2⁶⁰ bytes) cloud storage and big data analysis. Cloud computing technologies will get closer to the international advanced level. Cloud computing standards will be basically established. The influence of service innovation on technology innovation will be significantly enhanced. The level of development as a result of collaborative efforts of industry, academics, research and users will be substantially lifted.

Outstanding application results. Reform pilot areas will be established for open public records, IT resource integration and government procurement services. These areas are chosen from those with significant social benefits, strong industrial influence and exemplary role. Service resources will be fully used to carry out cloud computing and big data demonstration projects, with the aim to reduce the costs of starting up business, improve people's livelihood, foster new business forms and explore new development models in e-government platform. The number of data centres built by the government is expected to decrease by more than 5%.

Constantly improving infrastructure. Regional distribution of cloud computing data centres will be optimised with new large-scale centres having power usage efficiency (PUE) value higher than 1.5. The policy environment for the development of broadband networks will be gradually improved, with the necessary infrastructure initially built to meet the development needs of cloud computing.

Basically sound security. Information security supervision systems and industry standards and guidelines will be initially established to adapt to the needs of cloud computing, significantly raising the level of industrialisation and network security protection of the core technology products in cloud computing, and making cloud computing environment more secure and reliable.