SPENDING on public cloud services and technologies this year is set to surge by 50 percent to US$7.5 billion in the Asia-Pacific region excluding Japan, because of booming market demand especially in China, International Data Corp said yesterday.

Microsoft Corp will debut public cloud services next month on the Chinese mainland, the first foreign company to be approved to operate them in the domestic market. Microsoft's cloud services will help boost the development of China's cloud computing industry, one of the strategic industries to be developed in the 12th Five-Year Plan period that runs till 2015, according to experts.

Meanwhile, Chris Morris, IDC's analyst, said in a report that the emphasis on cloud services is not uniform as "China's spending intentions are clearly for on-premises private cloud investments while Singapore and Australia will spread spending across public, private and hosted cloud services, delivering a hybrid cloud environment by 2015."

Compared with private cloud computing services, public cloud services provide a less expensive and reliable way for people and enterprises to store and share data.