Throughout the past few years, digitization has rapidly evolved from a trendy buzzword into a fundamental segment of modern business strategies. At one point during this transformation, the philosophy simply had to grow beyond serving technological innovators, and step into the world of policy making to improve nations’ security, but also connectivity and productivity. As a next step towards a digitized society, the Polish Development Fund (PFR) has decided to team up with PKO Bank Polski to develop a National Cloud.
Digitization is one of the leading trends of the contemporary technological revolution – said Paweł Borys, President of the Management Board at PFR. It is becoming an increasingly important factor in the competitiveness of economies – from the development of small and medium-sized enterprises, to city management or medical services. (…) In countries where cloud services are developed, there is a rapid increase in the technological advancement of the economy.
In case you’re not too familiar with the basic principles of cloud computing, it tends to offer three kinds of services. The most common kind, Software as a Service (SaaS), uses the Internet to deliver third-party services to its consumers. You may recognize this kind of delivery from Google Apps, or Dropbox. Then there’s Platform as a Service (PaaS), used by the likes of Windows Azure, which can provide cloud services for use in third-party applications and databases, including blockchain. Lastly, we have Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), which functions as a self-service compute resources for hire. The twist? The Polish National Cloud will offer all three of these service standards.
The initiative and services which we are planning to launch in 2019 may become a significant factor in the development of the Polish economy – said Zbigniew Jagiełło, president of PKO Bank Polski. These services tend to be offered by major international players. Launching this kind of offer from our side should decrease costs for Polish entrepreneurs and improve their competitive changes, as cloud computing may become a chance to accelerate their digital transformation. – he added.
Apart from its aforementioned functionalities, the National Cloud will also offer support services within the realm of IT network support, migration, and modernization for businesses and public offices. If all goes well, PKO and PFR expect the Cloud to run its first IaaS and PaaS services to selected clients by the first quarter of 2019. From then on, the platform will be gradually expanded so that it can fully unwrap its offer to all prospective clients by 2020.
For more information about the National Cloud, feel free to check out PFR’s website.
