Industry Findings: Cloud compute adoption in South Korea continues to advance as enterprises modernize digital platforms within a strong national framework for data security and operational reliability. Organizations across technology, manufacturing, media, and public services are expanding compute usage to support enterprise IT systems, analytics pipelines, and digital content delivery. A clear structural signal emerged in Apr-2024 when South Korea reinforced cloud security certification and compliance frameworks for public-sector and critical workloads. This development has influenced enterprise procurement strategies by elevating requirements around resilience, continuity, and domestic data handling. Since then, demand has focused on general-purpose and memory-optimized virtual machines supporting enterprise applications and analytics workloads. Elastic compute is used mainly for development environments and workloads with variable demand. Through 2025, enterprises have continued prioritizing stable performance, compliance alignment, and gradual migration paths rather than rapid capacity expansion, reflecting a risk-aware approach to cloud compute adoption.
Industry Player Insights: South Korea’s competitive landscape is shaped by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Naver Cloud. In Jul-2024, Naver Cloud expanded compute capacity supporting enterprise and public-sector workloads hosted within South Korea. In Jan-2025, Microsoft Azure increased regional availability of memory-optimized virtual machines, improving performance for data-intensive enterprise applications.