pakistani flagIBM and Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd. have agreed to offer public cloud services in Pakistan, the companies announced. They will use servers located in Karachi and Lahore, the country’s first- and second-largest cities by population, respectively.

Among the cloud services to be offered are disaster recovery, back-up, storage, web-hosting and compute on demand.

Microsoft Azure does not list Pakistan among the regions it serves, or even among those it plans to serve. Nor does Amazon Web Services. Both do offer services in neighboring India.

“We believe this initiative will be a strong catalyst in developing the information and communications technology sector in Pakistan,” said Kamal Ahmed, Pakistan Telecommunications’ chief digital officer, in a release. Ghazanfar Ali, general manager of IBM Pakistan, added, “Now enterprises can focus more on their core business as IBM and PTCL can take care of their infrastructure needs.”

PTCL already hosts several large and mid-size enterprise customers on its data centers, it said, and cloud computing “is gaining traction in Pakistan.” Pakistan is home to numerous corporations, especially including utilities, banks, oil and gas companies and telecommunications firms. With a current population of 192.2 million, its gross domestic product has grown steadily since 2006, hitting US$269.9 billion last year

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