Colombia. With the growing and unstoppable demand for Cloud services, Colombia received a few months ago the good news of the exclusion of VAT on cloud computing services. This measure of the DIAN and the Min TIC encourages the providers of these services and becomes a general benefit for a large majority of Colombians who today depend on technology.
Isabel Cristina Yepes, Cloud Evangelist of Telefónica Colombia and lecturer of the academic space of Expo DataNet, assures that "in this concept it is defined that to be considered as Cloud computing -and therefore be exempt from VAT- the service must meet five mandatory characteristics, one of three defined service models and one of four established implementation models".
Yepes, an expert at Expo DataNet, clarifies that the unified concept 17056 that the DIAN and the Min TIC promulgated on August 25 of last year, which excludes cloud computing services from VAT, is not for everyone but for those who meet the following five primary characteristics:
1- On-demand self-service: "A consumer can unilaterally provide computing capabilities such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically, without the need for human interaction with each service provider."
2- Wide access to the network: "The services provided must be accessible through standard mechanisms and from heterogeneous platforms (computers, mobile phones and tablets)".
3- Common allocation of resources: "Resources are made available to consumers following a timeshare model, assigning physical or logical devices, which in turn meet the demand of said consumers."
4- Rapid elasticity: "The capacities in the resources provided to users must be able to grow or decrease on demand of these quickly, even through automatic processes".
5- Measurable service: Cloud systems must control and optimize their resources by providing themselves with capabilities to measure their performance. In addition, such control must allow to be reported in a transparent manner both to the service provider and to the consumer himself."
These measures give a leading role to the supplier, but clearly exclude from VAT also intermediaries based in the country. When a mediator is not domiciled in the national territory, he must carry out a self-diagnosis -proposed by the MINTIC- for the purposes of complying with the requirements of the exclusion since, if these are not met, he must pay the tax imposition.
But, adds Yepes, that when the marketing model is "packaged" and if within this "package" there are both taxed and excluded services, at the time of invoicing, these must be segregated and make the corresponding collections, that is, what is taxed with its corresponding tax, and what is excluded without it.
Beyond this tax issue, the expert, in her work of digital "evangelization", will speak at Expo DataNet about "Automation of cloud infrastructure provisioning", another topic of great interest to designers, installers, integrators, manufacturers and end users of the IT sector.
In this talk, Isabel Cristina Yepes will highlight how, today, modern computer centers are constituted in private clouds that implement virtualization services. At the same time, they allow them to respond quickly to the constant changes of customers, with the advantage that their tools can be used transversally in private, public or hybrid cloud, which facilitates their migration and growth processes in technological infrastructure.
These topics will be part of the commercial and academic space of Expo DataNet Andino, an event that is held with the purpose of updating knowledge about new solutions for data centers, computer infrastructure and ICTs, a space also conducive to strengthening the capacity in decision-making in the face of the purchase of products.
More information: http://colombia.expodatanet.com/
