A game can behave impeccably in testing and become uncooperative the moment real players arrive. Steve Hong remembers that particular indignity. The system looked ready; then came the disconnects. Asking the cloud provider what had gone wrong did not produce the answer he needed. For a developer with a game to run, a working test was a rather expensive consolation prize.
That experience sits near the beginning of Cloocus, the company Hong founded in May 2019. Today its work includes cloud consulting, data platforms, security and AI operations. Hong’s public career offers a less tidy explanation of that business than a founding slogan could: he learned what a customer needs by being the customer whose technology needed help.
He goes by Steve Hong in English and Hong Seong-wan in Korean. His route into the cloud passed through enterprise software, Silicon Valley and online games. Along the way, the same question kept acquiring new forms. Once a company has bought the technology, who will make it useful?
A developer discovers the rest of the game
Hong began his working life as a developer at Samsung SDS and later worked in the United States at SecuGen. His LinkedIn profile describes more than three decades overseeing software projects. It also records study at Kyung Hee University from 1999 to 2001 and a publication, How to learn Database, dated 1993. Software was part of his career long before cloud became the organizing idea of his business.
Games widened that education. Hong has described pooling money with friends to acquire a game company after working as a developer in Silicon Valley. He expected an IT undertaking. Instead, he found himself learning about music, art and scenarios as well. A game asked its software to share the stage with several other disciplines, none inclined to disappear simply because an engineer was in charge.
His account includes a difficult first year, exhausted funds, a possible publishing agreement and contracts across numerous countries. The anticipated release still did not arrive. He eventually closed the game business after seven years. This part of the story gives his later career its weight: he had experienced how much can stand between building something and delivering it.
Six months, one day, and the bill afterward
In a 2019 recollection, Hong described a game-development and server-preparation process that had taken six months. Cloud computing, he said, compressed that preparation to a day. The comparison was his account of a particular experience, rather than a promise about every project. It explains why the change caught his attention. Infrastructure had been eating time that the product needed.
By 2016, he was providing Azure solutions through GTPlus. He had used Microsoft’s cloud for game development, launch and continuing service. That experience became part of the advice he could offer other game companies. Cloocus followed in 2019, bringing the growing cloud business into a company of its own.
Yet speed brought another job along with it. Hong has spoken about unexpected costs and the difficulty of studying an expanding cloud platform while also developing games. New features and design concepts kept arriving. His answer was to specialize: choose Microsoft Azure, learn it deeply, and offer customers help they could not conveniently provide for themselves. The name Cloocus combines cloud and focus. For once, the invented corporate word came with a fairly literal explanation.
- 01Use itGames expose the cloud’s practical problems.
- 02Learn itAzure specialization becomes a service.
- 03Operate itData, security and AI expand the assignment.
A campus needs more than a ribbon
On May 25, 2022, Hong stood at the center of a ribbon-cutting photograph in Busan. Beside him were Microsoft Korea leaders and representatives of the city and its information-industry agency. Cloocus was opening a campus in the Centum Cloud Cluster, with a Global Tech Hub operated in cooperation with Microsoft.
The proposed activities were concrete: workshops for regional industries, cloud education, meetups and mentoring. Manufacturing, maritime businesses and finance were among the local sectors in view. Hong described three purposes for the campus: help companies in the Busan, Ulsan and Gyeongnam region adopt cloud services, build a Microsoft-based partner community, and develop cloud talent.
That list belongs in his story because it extends the founding problem beyond one customer. A region can acquire infrastructure and still need people who understand it. The campus brought training and partners into the picture. The scissors made an agreeable photograph; the workshops were where the useful work was supposed to happen.
The quieter machinery beneath AI
Hong’s company began with a concentrated Azure practice, but its later decisions took it toward several cloud providers and deeper data work. The progression is visible in the services around the headline technology. Databases, permissions and information movement are less theatrical than a conversational AI demonstration. They also have to work after the demonstration ends.
In September 2024, Cloocus received Databricks’ Data and AI Governance Partner of the Year award for South Korea. Its announced work included integrated governance using Unity Catalog. The emphasis was on managing data assets, extending the company’s role beyond moving information from one place to another. For Hong, it provided a tangible milestone in the data and AI direction.
A January 2026 partnership with Fivetran added another piece. Announced alongside Fivetran’s Seoul-region availability, it focused on automated data integration, architecture support and customer implementation. Hong described combining data-movement technology with Cloocus’s platform expertise. Local hosting was part of the proposition for Korean customers.
Security belonged alongside that work. In 2025, Cloocus outlined expanded cooperation with Wiz after the opening of its Korean data center, including consulting and a dedicated technical team. These arrangements show the breadth of the job Hong was pursuing: an AI environment needs its information connected, its operation supported and its risks understood. The glamorous part has quite a large supporting cast.
“MSPs must add value through new technologies like AI.”
Steve Hong · July 2024
The games never quite left
For all that widening, gaming remains a visible part of Cloocus. The company was Microsoft’s Korea Partner of the Year in 2021, 2022 and 2023. In November 2025, it became a global finalist in the Microsoft Partner of the Year Gaming category. A finalist designation is a specific distinction; it does not turn into a win by being printed in larger type.
Krafton, Pearl Abyss and Netmarble appear among the game customers identified in the announcement. The work described includes global operations, traffic management and the use of Microsoft AI and security technologies. Hong presented the recognition as evidence of the company’s capabilities among international partners.
There is a satisfying continuity here. His earlier game business had shown him how an ambitious product could struggle to reach its audience. Cloocus now works on the operational systems that game companies depend on. The founder moved into a different business while carrying a detailed acquaintance with the first business’s difficulties.
Partner of the Year
Gaming category
Coney gets a cameo
Hong’s public posts occasionally interrupt the corporate vocabulary. Writing about Microsoft Inspire in 2023, he thanked the Cloocus employees behind the third consecutive Korea partner award and described learning from Satya Nadella’s keynote. Then came the detail that a committee would struggle to improve: he had filmed an introductory video with his dog Coney, and both appeared briefly in it.
In another post, from September 2024, he described leaving early for BEXCO in Busan and arriving to join the team that had been preparing the exhibition booth since the previous day. He thanked the Databricks and Wiz partners taking part. A founder’s public schedule can sound abstract until it includes an early departure and colleagues already waiting at the stand.
Neither moment needs to bear the burden of explaining his entire personality. They are useful glimpses of the person doing the work: the executive at the exhibition, the software veteran still taking lessons from a keynote, the dog owner who left the dog in the introduction.
A room in Seoul, subtitles across borders
At Cloocus’s December 5, 2025 town hall, the company gathered employees in Seoul and included colleagues from Malaysia. Real-time AI translation subtitles helped participants follow the event across languages. For a business discussing AI services, this was a conveniently practical use of the technology in its own meeting.
Hong outlined a strategy centered on ClooSphere, the company’s AI-agent-driven platform for managing services across clouds. AI, data and security capabilities, international growth and IPO preparation were the priorities. Team leaders from sales, data and AI, cloud technology, cybersecurity and Malaysia then presented their own work and plans.
The meeting also included employee questions and awards organized around three values: proactive, innovative and enjoyable. Peers selected the recipients through a company-wide vote. Those details put people around a strategy that might otherwise remain a collection of product names.
An overseas operation needs a message people can understand, and a technical business needs colleagues who can translate that message into daily work. The town hall shows Hong trying to connect those levels. It also gives a modest illustration of his company’s proposition: make a complicated tool serve a recognizable purpose, even when that purpose is simply helping everyone follow the meeting.
The next customer is across the ocean
By April 2026, Hong was describing a more specific American audience: small and medium-sized businesses having difficulty hiring cloud and AI operations specialists. Cloocus had selected NH Investment & Securities and Hana Securities as joint lead underwriters for its planned IPO. He presented overseas investment as a purpose of the listing preparations.
He also gave a cautious assessment of AI adoption in Korea. In his view, experiments were plentiful and production deployments less common. He argued for clear objectives and measurable returns before moving projects into continuing operation. That assessment was his judgment, rather than a national statistical measure.
The international footprint already included Korea, the United States, Malaysia and Japan. Cloocus’s history records the opening of its Japanese branch in April 2025. Hong’s next ambition asks how much of the experience acquired in Korea can travel with the company.
It is a fitting question for a developer whose career crossed industries before it crossed these markets. He has learned that promising technology creates work around itself: education, implementation, troubleshooting, security and support. Cloocus is his attempt to organize that work into a business. The game that misbehaved at launch belongs to the past. The customer waiting for an answer remains very much in view.