An appreciation of the multibillion-dollar marketplace for cloud services is also required. Yet a more technical understanding will only go so far. A more nuanced picture emerges when the cloud is considered in terms of its layers-from the physical data centers and network cabling that form its foundation to the virtual software environments and applications that everyday users interact with. Thinking through the public policy implications, the image of a cloud obscures as much as it explains. National Security Agency, explained in 2016. This starts with the question: what is the cloud? Most of the debate is about the public cloud, 5 and the short answer is “cloud computing is really just a fancy name for someone else’s computer,” as Rob Joyce, then chief of the Tailored Access Operations at the U.S. However, the debate about cloud security remains vague and the public policy implications poorly understood. For example, a 2018 report estimates that a three-to-six-day outage of a major CSP would cause economic losses up to $15 billion. Calls for regulating CSPs have been growing amid concerns about the systemic risk of businesses’ move to the cloud. According to a March 2020 Business Insider article, one expert projected that more than half (55 percent) of workloads would be migrated to the cloud by 2022 compared to 33 percent now he claimed that these projections “now look conservative as these targets could be reached a full year ahead of expectations given pace.” 3 In the wake of the pandemic’s initial outbreak and the accompanying move to telework, previously cautious executives started seeing migration to the cloud as an urgent necessity.Īs businesses increasingly rely on cloud services, the role of the huge cloud service providers (CSPs) has received greater scrutiny. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed how important the cloud is for bolstering societal resilience. 1 By 2020, the overall cloud services market is expected to be $266.4 billion, a 17 percent increase compared to 2019. Even the Pentagon is betting on the cloud with its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract. ![]() ![]() Tech companies report multiple billions of dollars in revenues, increasingly driven by their cloud businesses. Omnipresent advertisements at airports, on buses, and on websites further embed the term in society’s collective consciousness. In less than fifteen years, it has become part of everyday life and casual conversations about moving photos and other data into the cloud. ![]() The growth of the cloud has been truly astonishing.
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