Around the world, people, businesses and governments are turning to cloud computing to improve performance or add capabilities. According to a recent study by Oxford Economics, two-thirds of interviewed senior business and IT executives predicted speed and innovation as the gains by moving to the cloud. Cloud computing offers endless possibilities, and the sky is the limit, especially in South Korea.

South Korea’s Internet development is as jaw-dropping as its past economic growth. Following the Korean War, South Korean’s economic blastoff turned the country into the world’s 13th-largest economy. With nearly 100 percent wireless and broadband penetration, people enjoy the one-gigabyte-per-second connection anytime and anywhere. The country’s Internet infrastructure is the envy of people around the world.

This capable infrastructure provides a great foundation for the cloud. Today, software as a service and platform as a service are the common consumption models, but that’s just one facet of the cloud. According to McKinsey & Company, the cloud represents more than 2 billion cloud-based email users and $1.7 trillion in economic activity. They project organizations will invest $3 trillion on IT to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud. The flexibility, efficiency, and collaborative abilities enabled by cloud will create far-flung economic and social effects.

In the future, the cloud will transform much of IT into services delivered through networks, and this will help create a stronger services economy in Korea. The services sector has been an important economic engine in developed countries, representing 70 percent of GDP in OECD countries. In Korea, the services sector represents only 58 percent of GDP. Cloud solutions will not only provide real-time public services for traffic monitoring and forecasting and medical tracking, it will also help industries like banking and retail, which are skills and knowledge intensive, improve their operational efficiency and customer services.

Small and mid-size enterprises represent almost half of Korea’s economic output, and for these organizations, the cloud brings a number of benefits. Cloud computing frees SMEs from capital IT investment to focus on their core business activities. And the cloud’s pay-as-you-go pricing model can provide flexible charges based on different demand and usage. In addition, the cloud helps these organizations reap the benefits from the rise of mobility and employee owned devices. In face of financing shortage and high turnover rate, SMEs will sail through fierce competition with improved bottom line and productive workforce with the help of cloud.

The manufacturing industry will benefit from cloud solutions too. With world-class giants like Samsung and Hyundai, manufacturing forms the backbone of Korea’s economy. Compared with service organizations, manufacturers tend to face far more complexities. When you produce more than 40,000 products and components and have a business presence in more than 80 countries, things can get tough. Here, the cloud helps. For example, cosmetics maker Revlon saved $70 million over two years, and when its data center in Venezuela burned to the ground, the company shifted operations to New Jersey in two hours. Along the whole value chain, the cloud can provide solutions to streamline process and information flow, taking Korean manufacturing to a new level.

Samsung is taking Korea’s mobile industry to new heights. One of its competitive advantages is its ability to quickly innovate, which is derived in part from open innovation. The cloud can provide more effective platforms for collaboration and innovation.

In the world of business, many organizations have traditionally used IT to become more competitive. Today through cloud, IT offers more promise than ever before ― the possibility to connect billions of devices and integrate different platforms to be lean, agile, productive and collaborative. In the long term such revolutionary change will energize millions of businesses in Korea. As the needs and perceptions of users evolve, the cloud ― together with other novel technologies ― will continually contribute to the success of our world.

The writer is the co-CEO of SAP, a multinational software company. The opinions reflected in the article are his own. ― Ed.

By Jim Hagemann Snabe