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Since the information and communications technology (ICT) development was a policy of national competitive advantages to support the 21st-century development of Asia-Pacific countries decades ago, computing technology has been undergoing cultural changes from static websites, interactive portals, to cloud computing in recent years. While many private clouds keep emerging to help business firms in new competition environment, IT vendors and researchers have recognized huge potential of public clouds. Gartner, a renowned research firm, forecasted the expenditure on public clouds growing from $91 billion in 2011 to $109 billion in 2012, with a target at $200 billion by 2016. Governments will flag public cloud development as ICT driver to further stimulate socio-economic growth in their countries over the next ten years. However, government policy is critical to sustaining this trend of growing public clouds, and in turn stirs up the next generation of worldwide ICT revolution. Subject to realizing the revolution with support of the growing Internet populations, every part in the world, like city facilities, industries, government services and education, etc., may significantly change. It is foreseeable that different countries expect to foster tailor-made public cloud solutions to fit with their own demographic and socio-economic needs. While foreseeing the influences of national ICT strategic policies on the formation of potential public cloud solutions, we propose this study to review a possible taxonomy of public clouds, like City cloud, Industry cloud, Government cloud (G-cloud), Education cloud, and Hybrid cloud, etc., for strategic ICT development in the next generation of the information age.
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