Naver Cloud aims to be top 3 player in Asia-Pacific region

On Wednesday, the company held an annual online conference titled “Naver Cloud Summit 2022,” and discussed its plan for global expansion.

Park Weon-gi, Naver Cloud CEO, speaks during an online conference named ″Naver Cloud Summit 2022″ on Wednesday. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

Naver Cloud hopes to become a top 3 player in the Asia-Pacific region, from its current fifth place.

On Wednesday, the company held an annual online conference titled “Naver Cloud Summit 2022,” and discussed its plan for global expansion.

“Naver Cloud’s short-term goal is to become one of the three largest cloud service providers in the Asia-Pacific region,” CEO Park Weon-gi said Wednesday.

Pivoting to Singapore, the company aims to extend its business into Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and more. In November, Naver Cloud signed a memorandum of understanding with StarHub, Singapore’s major telecom company, for consumer and business services.

It is also preparing to expand its foothold in the European region where there is no dominant player in the market yet, said Park, as the company “is on its way to join the European Cloud Alliance.”

Naver Cloud, which began its service in 2017, has 23 data centers in 10 countries.

The company cited the “sovereign cloud” strategy as its strength against bigger rivals such as AWS, Microsoft and Google.

A sovereign cloud operates in compliance with the local laws of each country regarding data storage requirements, information collection and data access.

“While the overseas cloud service providers, or so-called ‘Big 3,’ are holding on the global standard policy, Naver Cloud is expanding our market share by adapting to each country’s regulatory system or policy and localizing our service,” said Park.

During the session, Park mentioned that “Naver’s seven-stage service infrastructure backup system” enabled the company to quickly recover from a data center breakdown in October.

On Oct. 15, a fire broke out at SK C&C’s data center building in Pangyo, Gyeonggi, which houses servers for Kakao and Naver. While Kakao services went down for more than 127 hours, Naver reported only partial disruptions of some services, which they recovered several hours later.

Park said “we apologize that some of the services did not run smoothly after the incident,” but explained that “a dual backup system is applied to all of our services.”

BY SHIN HA-NEE [shin.hanee@joongang.co.kr]