North Korea’s state media has announced that the secretive state will soon join the cloud era with the launch of its own cloud computing service. Known as ‘Eunjong’ – or ‘Benevolent Affection’ – the service will focus on cloud storage and provide a similar service to that offered by Google Drive and Dropbox. The news, published in North Korea’s ‘Arirang-maeri’ state media news outlet, suggests the initiative is being driven by the country’s Information Science Technology Department and is close to completion.
The news comes on the heels of the launch of an online B2B shopping platform for North Korean businesses in November last year. There was no indication if or when the service would be made available to the general public. However, many speculate it will not be made available via the internet, but through the country’s strictly controlled intranet. Current reports suggest that only 500,000 North Koreans have access to the state’s intranet.
While the launch of any cloud computing capability is likely to buoy North Korea’s leadership, the technology being proposed is approximately 10 years behind that of South Korea’s capability. The Eunjong server will offer a maximum of 40 trillion floating-point operations per second (40T FLOPS). This compares to the capability of some smartphones that can reach up to ten million FLOPS.
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