In 2012 we wrote about the dangers posed to cloud computing in our contribution to the 2013 UNCTAD Information Economy Report. When the lower court ruling mandating Microsoft to give the government access to data stored in Ireland came out in 2014, this is what we said. Now the Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Microsoft: On Thursday, Bradford L. Smith, Microsoft’s president, said the court’s ruling was a victory for digital privacy rights. He added that the adoption of cloud services by customers in some countries, especially in the public sector, had slowed as a result of the uncertainty around the privacy of their communications.
We at LIRNEasia have always seen transaction costs at the heart of much of what we do. Our interest in ICTs in value chains, for example, has been focused on changes to transaction costs made possible by ICTs. This fascinating article on the business models underlying cloud computing foregrounds the scale economies perfected by the likes of Amazon. But perhaps the real story is in the negligible transaction costs of billing? This economics of tiny things demonstrates the global power of the few companies, including Microsoft and Google, that can make fortunes counting this small and often.
The impact of cloud computing and M2M communication at the emerging economies was discussed at the ninth Internet Governance forum, that was held in Turkey, this September. Rohan Samarajiva, the founding chair of LIRNEasia spoke at the Workshop03:Cloud Computing & M2M: Impacts for Emerging Economies. Here is the youtube clip for the workshop 03. Go to 21:51 for Rohan’s take on the topic You can also find the transcription here
Setting the Scene Focus Session – Tuesday, September 2 • 11:00am – 12:30pm Sub-themes for IGF 2014 a) POLICIES ENABLING ACCESS Speaker: Rohan Samarajiva, LirneAsia, Sri Lanka Rohan will provide a bird’s eye view on progress and challenges in achieving affordable access for all. He will highlight controversial issues that came up in the last year, such as: net neutrality role of governments and regulators vs role of markets: are we getting the balance right so that the benefits get to those who need it most? access for all: public access, access for the poorest of the poor, access for people with disability Virat Bhatia will provide a review of how the topic will be discussed at the IGF 2014 at workshops and in the ‘access’ main session. Policies Enabling Access, Growth and Development on the Internet, Main session –Wednesday, September 3, 0930-1200 Here, Rohan Samarajiva will speak on policies conducive to Internet use. Workshop No.
Are still slow, but how will they be lagging behind? And once the Americans screw up the data confidentiality safeguards, cost may be the decider. In terms of performance, Alibaba cannot come close. For a Chinese site, it does impressive work, handling $5.8 billion in commerce on China’s heaviest shopping day.
Below is what we said were among critical policy issues in cloud computing: The storage of data in multiple, usually foreign, jurisdictions raises a different set of regulatory issues including data protection and police investigatory powers. The jurisdictional issues are anchored on the location of the firm and the location of the data. In the former instance, wherever the data may be located, the firm may be ordered to ensure that data are subject to the laws applicable to the jurisdiction within which the firm is located. As a corollary, the firm may be required to ensure that the data are located ins jurisdictions where the laws are consistent with those of its home jurisdiction. This was not too difficult a problem in the past because the firms that stored or processed data in foreign locations were large entities with capability to enforce the applicable rules through contracts and otherwise.
We flagged this as a critical issue in our contribution to the UNCTAD Information Economy Report, written before Snowden. Now the rubber is hitting the road and billions of revenue are at stake. The Snowden leaks and the view that American tech companies were too cooperative with the United States government have hurt the prospects for American tech companies abroad. Earlier estimates of potential lost sales over the next few years have ranged as high as $180 billion, or 25 percent of industry revenue, according to Forrester Research. To address those concerns, the companies are building more data centers abroad.
In our contribution to the 2013 UNCTAD Information Economy Report, we talked about the likely importance of place in cloud services purchasing decisions: The storage of data in multiple, usually foreign, jurisdictions raises a different set of regulatory issues including data protection and police investigatory powers. The jurisdictional issues are anchored on the location of the firm and the location of the data. In the former instance, wherever the data may be located, the firm may be ordered to ensure that data are subject to the laws applicable to the jurisdiction within which the firm is located. As a corollary, the firm may be required to ensure that the data are located is jurisdictions where the laws are consistent with those of its home jurisdiction. This was not too difficult a problem in the past because the firms that stored or processed data in foreign locations were large entities with capability to enforce the applicable rules through contracts and otherwise.
In a recent contribution to a just-published UNCTAD report on cloud computing we said: The other aspect of the problem is whether data are subject to the laws of the jurisdictions where the cloud computing companies are located. For example, take the case of a company in Country A using the services of a cloud computing supplier registered in Country B, which dynamically stores and processes the Country A firm’s data on server farms located in Countries C, D and E. Country A may not be happy to have the laws of Country B apply to the data and that its police may go trawling therein. The applicability of the laws of the country where the storage and processing occurred poses a new set of problems, because even determining which country has jurisdiction may be difficult in light of dynamic resource allocation. This was well before Snowden changed the entire discourse.
I touched on this issue at the cloud computing session at IGF 2013 in Bali. The scandal of NSA and CIA spying is likely to do serious damage to US firms. I for one do not place much faith in the good behavior of any government and do not see much point in simply replacing American companies with non-American. The backlash against government Internet surveillance could hurt the United States economy, partly because businesses and consumers could abandon United States cloud companies, said Richard Salgado, the director for law enforcement and information security at Google, in testimony before the Senate judiciary subcommittee on privacy, technology and the law. He cited studies like one from Forrester that predicted the cloud computing industry could lose $180 billion, 25 percent of its revenue, by 2016.
Today at IGF 2013 in Bali, I was part of a panel on cloud and mobile computing. We at LIRNEasia need cloud computing. But we are also realistic about the challenges. Here is the slideset I used to illustrate the quality problems. But I also talked about the weak links in the chain and what was being done to strengthen them.
Data centers are what cloud computing will run on. They are what we hope will be located on the southern slopes of the Himalayas, making use of the cheap hydro that is plentifully available, political circumstances permitting. But of course, less electricity use is better. Fueled by an insatiable demand for new Internet services and a shift to so-called cloud computing services that are largely hosted in commercial data centers and in the large data farms operated by companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, there has been an increasing discussion about the growing percentage of the nation’s electricity that will be consumed by vast data centers being constructed at a record pace. But the new report indicates that electricity used by global data centers in 2010 remained relatively modest.
David Pogue, my favorite writer on gadgets has reviewed the first laptop made specifically for cloud computing: no hard disk, no software. Just the cloud. And the verdict is . . .
Paul Baran. The history of the Internet cannot be told without mention of his name. I remember reading him while still in grad school. I was reminded of what he wrote about information utilities when engaging in debates about cloud computing in recent times. In my book, if you can have readers think about what you wrote 30 years down the road in relation to contemporary debates, you made an impact as a scholar.
We talk of the cloud, but do we talk about the same thing? The Economist has a good piece on definitions and measurements. The “cloud of clouds” has three distinct layers. The outer one, called “software as a service” (SaaS, pronounced sarse), includes web-based applications such as Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, and Salesforce.com, which helps firms keep track of their customers.
Rohan Samarajiva, LIRNEasia‘s CEO, will deliver one of two keynote addresses on “Imagining the Future and Making it Happen”, at the inaugural WSO2 Conference, WSO2Con 2010, in Colombo, on 14 and 15 September 2010. The conference is organized by WSO2, the open source technology company headed by CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana, in celebration of its fifth anniversary. Download presentation slides, here. The conference intends to become an annual international event of bringing together a technology community to exchange knowledge, vision, and share best practices and success stories. Under the title, “Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud Computing: Blueprint for the Future Enterprise”, this year’s conference will focus on the implications and opportunities unleashed by the convergence of SOA and Cloud computing.