Over the last several years, China has become famous for it’s vast clubs and gangs of independent hackers- or, in Chinese, heike- “black guests”. In 2004, American computer security expert estimated, through an extensive analysis of websites hosting Chinese hacker clubs, that China had about 380,000 hackers in various organizations. This was at a time when China’s general population of internet users had just topped 100 million- and a poll issued that same year said that nearly 1 in 3 Chinese elementary school students aspired to be hackers themselves.

Today, in 2011, the Chinese internet population has increased fivefold- reaching 500 million users earlier this year. In the meantime, Chinese universities have been producing more than 150,000 software and computer scientists and engineers, as well as IT and MIS specialists per year, and countless self-taught hackers have emerged in webcafes, offices, homes and universities from Gansu to Guangdong- meaning China’s “hacker army” easily now exceeds more than a million people.

Among other things, a hacker community this vast, combined with huge unsecured networks (think of the ubiquitous “internet bars” that can be found in every city in China, or corporate networks and servers in lower-tier cities), presents an amazing breeding ground for viruses, and many Chinese virii have gone on to become global menaces.

But like a biological system, China’s plethora of hackers and viral infections has lead to the development of some of the world’s best anti-viral and security software- and have now taken the lead in mobile security. For example, in October 2011, Beijing-based NetQin Mobile’s NetQin Mobile Security 5.0 anti-virus system took the highest ratings of any mobile security system in the world in US-based West Coast Labs study of mobile security programs. The program, for Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry, is an SaaS program that has already captured 100 million users globally- having put a Chinese company in the unique position of being an international security leader.

This example is provided to underscore a greater point- that China’s own insecure networks may, counter-intuitively, turn the country into a cloud computing security superpower. With hacking and software security violation having long been problems in the country, we’ll likely see more and more companies coming to rely on outsourced SaaS and IaaS systems. With software as a service, companies will gradually be forced to embrace new formats and protocols or fall behind technologically- and using pirate copies of programs will no longer be an option. Likewise, server outsourcing provides a new way for companies to avoid the traditional dangers of the Chinese internet- hackers who, frequently driven by nationalist ideologies, like nothing more than to hack into foreign data being hosted on Chinese soil. With a 24-hour monitoring and security team, you’re far safer than you would be using a private server.

China’s internet doesn’t have to be a dangerous place- but every system administrator or executive needs to be aware of the dangers, and the advantages of cloud systems in mitigating them.