SK C&C heads toward cloud service for growth

SK C&C, an IT service affiliate under SK Group, is targeting its cloud business for future growth and is looking to attract more enterprises by offering customized services.

The IT service market focused on designing and building up IT infrastructure for companies is slowing down while the cloud service market is maintaining an annual 20 percent growth, the company said Thursday.

The increase in demand for cloud-based services is largely due to development of new technologies including big data and the Internet of Things, which is faster and more economical to service on cloud than on-the-premises IT equipment or companies’ private clouds.

SK C&C established Cloud Z in September after starting a local data center to back cloud business in Pangyo, Gyeonggi, a month before. Cloud Z’s competency lies in the fact it is a hybrid cloud, which means an enterprise can make use of SK’s cloud service in link with its existing private cloud or on-the-premises data storage.

“Our hybrid cloud system has competency over competitors in that enterprises can keep their on-premise system as well as privately set up a cloud while making use of our public cloud,” said Shin Hyun-seok, vice president of SK C&C’s Cloud Z business. Shin previously worked for Microsoft and Amazon cloud services.

According to Shin, enterprise customers would have to move their private clouds to Microsoft’s Hyper-V Cloud, a server virtualization solution offered by the American company, to benefit from Microsoft’s public cloud Azure. Other global competitors like Amazon and Oracle operate in a similar way.

“It’s hard for companies to scrap their on-premise servers and private clouds to move onto public clouds and that’s why hybrid cloud service has a big growth potential,” Shin said. SK’s cloud is serviced based on 40 global data centers operated by its partner IBM.

BY KIM JEE-HEE [kim.jeehee@joongang.co.kr]