What the reader will learn:
• Cloud
computing will impact not only on business but also on our society, economy and
politics.
• ‘Green
IT’, or sustainable IT, will bene fi t from cloud computing.
• New
business models created by changes in technology can have a signifi c ant
effect on our society.
• Governments
all over the world are looking to cloud to help make their interaction with
society more ef fi cient and, sometimes, more democratic.
•
 |
People are using cloud to help empower themselves.
3.1 How IT Has Historically Made an Impact on Society
That technology
can make enormous changes to human society is not in doubt. Where would we be
without the invention of the wheel? But deep-seated changes have also happened
as a result of advances in computing.
There are good texts about the history of computing,
for example, A Brief History of Computing, Gerald O’Regan, Springer (2008) .
Conversely, as there is a strong argument that cloud only really started around
2008, there is not much of a history of cloud to examine. We can, however,
learn from what happened in the past when new IT became commonplace.
Many of the early developments in computing
were driven by military or commercial needs. The large mainframe computers that
were the primary form of computing were so expensive that only wealthy
corporations or governments could afford to purchase and run them. Ordinary
people would react to computing with a sense of awe and, not understanding it,
might well be wary or even frightened by it.
R. Hill et
al., Guide to Cloud Computing: Principles and Practice, Computer 43
Communications and Networks, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-4603-2_3,
© Springer-Verlag London 2013
I n this era, middle managers who
needed information to help them make business decisions would think nothing of
having to wait for days for the data they needed. The request would need to be
coded, probably into COBOL, then perhaps handed to a punch-card operator who
would punch the programme, and then on to await an allotted, and very valuable,
processing slot. Output from this request would probably be on a continuous run
of sprocket-holed paper, along with many other outputs. A further wait might
ensue whilst awaiting the specialist paper decollator or burster.
W ith the advent of personal
computing in the 1980s, managers were able to collect and manipulate data
without waiting for the still very powerful mainframe. The relational database,
with its English-like SQL language, also helped empower decision-makers.
Critical information could be delivered in a few seconds, and organisations
could gain competitive advantage by accessing information swiftly. Moreover,
new information might be uncovered by using data mining techniques.
At this stage, computing was still a very
expensive discipline. Personal computers could cost around 10% of the US median
salary. Despite Moore’s Law bringing us evermore powerful processors, the price
was now nearer 1% of median income. In many nations, the PC has become just
another household electric item, as well as an of fi ce-based workstation.
The acceptance of PCs into the household was
doubtless aided by the transition from text-based interaction to the graphical
user interface, such as that provided by Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac. The
trend towards ease of use allowed noncomputer literate people to become
familiar with the bene fi ts that a home computer provided.
And then came access to the Internet to make
PCs even more useful in a social context, as well as at work. Now, whole
generations of geographically dispersed families and friends keep in touch with
tools like email and Skype. Online search tools, such as Google, mean that
no-one ever needs not to know any fact.
I t isn’t all benefi t s though.
Concerns about the often secretive elements of early computing were common. In
his paper, Models for the social accountability of computing, 1980 , Bob
Kling said:
Unlike many technologies, however,
computing generates problems which are generally subtle, private, and potential
rather than dramatic, public, and probably harmful.
A s we have seen elsewhere,
security is still at the top of the worry-list for many people. In broadening
the potential participation of citizens, cloud is also collecting more and more
information about individuals. And organisations worry about where, physically,
their critical data is being stored.
Society’s attitude to computing has changed
signi fi cantly in the past few decades. In some countries, it is the computer
illiterate who is unusual. People are no longer frightened by the technology
itself. Children are exposed to ICT at a very early age and so computer usage
becomes the norm.
T here have been measures of
attitude to computing (ATC) in the past. Perhaps the fi rst was Lee’s Social Attitudes and the
Computer Revolution (1970) in which he examined attitudes to computers.
Interviews he carried out gathered sentiments like ‘they are going too far with
these machines’ and ‘they create unemployment’.
3.2 The Ethical Dimension
People did say positive things too, but it would be hard
to envisage getting too many answers like ‘there is something strange and
frightening about these machines’. In a more recent paper, Wang ( 2007) points out that both technology and society
have changed dramatically since Lee and he proposed a three-dimensional model
for measuring ATC: senses of benefi t , harm and dependence. They found
respondents saying things like: ‘I can’t live without my computer for a single
day’; ‘When using computers, I feel the computer and I become one, and I forget
myself’; ‘I’d rather browse or chat on the Internet than go on an excursion.’
These fi n dings illustrate the way that we have changed our views on computing
over the years.
But we started by saying we would try to learn
from previous ICT trends to help us guess about the future of cloud. So, when
we see that people were expressing concerns about security in the 1980s, and
yet we see how the computing has become commonplace, perhaps we should be
cautious about dismissing cloud merely on the grounds of security. If the bene
fi ts can be cheaply made to outweigh the potential risks, and those risks are
managed as well as possible, it seems likely that our society will continue to
want to acquire the latest technology in this area.
3.2 The Ethical Dimension
As we saw in the
previous section, society’s fi rst
reaction to computing advances, as it has been with many previous advances, has
often been one of scepticism or concern. IT professionals are now far more aware
of this public image, and organisations like the BCS and IET address this by
expecting members of the professional body to follow a code of ethics.
As we shall see in the later discussion about
politics in the cloud, there are potential benefi t s to be accrued from using
the cloud to increase citizen participation in decision-making. There are,
however, threats from the same process. Prime amongst them is perhaps that of
privacy infringements that can happen when gathering data for political reasons.
S ociety will also need to take
care with cloud availability if an increasing number of services are made
available through cloud technologies. There are two key potential issues about
ensuring the fairness of access that need to be noted:
1. Even
in technologically advanced countries where the infrastructure might be in
place to allow all people access to the cloud, there are many people who are
either computer illiterate or prefer to use nonelectronic communications.
2. A
few countries do have an infrastructure that would allow universal access, but
many, including some of the biggest countries, are a long way from that
situation.
Cloud-based health advice is now becoming
commonplace, for example, in the UK, there is NHS Direct (
http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/ ) which provides ‘health advice and
reassurance, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year’. This is a prime example of the
use of cloud to share vital information widely and ef fi ciently.
U K health offi c ials (h
ttp://www.guardian.co.uk/healthcare-network/2011/may/12/ european-ehealth-week-neelie-kroes) believe ICT-enabled self-care could
potentially reduce GP visits by 40% and hospital admissions by 50% (Kroes 2011) .
H owever, we are a long way from replacing
doctors’ surgeries, drop-in centres or telephone help. In many Western
countries, interaction with a healthcare professional is still seen by many as
the only way to seek medical help with the expectation that the state will
supply that service.
But in countries without this tradition or
where quali fi ed help is limited, cloud, especially in mobile form, can indeed
work for the good of remote information-poor areas.
U niversities have a long track
record of investigating the ways that ICT can be put to sound, ethical use, and
this is continuing in the cloud era. Professor Andy Dearden from Sheffi e ld
Hallam University, for example, examines designs for applying interactive
systems to promote social change and development, which he calls e-SocialAction.
He is working on Bridging the Global Digital Divide and leads a research
project looking at Practical Design for Social Action, which is investigating
technology design in voluntary groups, trade-unions, community groups,
campaigning organisations and NGOs.
He describes one project (Rural e-services:
Participatory co-design of Sustainable Software and Business Systems in Rural
Co-operatives) which is examining ways of improving the dissemination of
agricultural advice in a rural area of India:
T his project has been working with
marginal farmers in Sironj, Madhya Pradesh, India, to explore how participatory
approaches to ICT design and participatory approaches to social development can
be combined. Together [with other partners], we have designed and implemented a
new communications system using mobile camera phones and web systems to improve
the fl o w of agricultural knowledge and advice between the advisors in the
crop-producer’s co-operative, and the farmers in the villages around Sironj.
3.3 Social Aspects
I t can be argued that society began to view computing
as an everyday tool after the GUI tools like Windows and Apple GUI began to
become widely available. These interfaces suddenly made the computer far more
approachable to nonspecialists.
O
ther changes in the last couple of decades have
also helped with this integration of computing into society. Perhaps the most
signifi c ant is the introduction of mobile computing. From the earliest
‘luggable’ laptops to today’s iPads and smartphones, the trend has been to
allow people to access music, information and many other digital artefacts from
more and more places. If we are lucky enough to live where there is good
broadband coverage and own any of these devices, we need never not know a fact.
We can always Google and fi nd out.
P
eople born in the West during the last 20 years
are not likely to be so worried by IT. Indeed there is much evidence that IT
changes are actively sought as people try to acquire the latest and best new
iPhone or netbook. Those people demand changes. They no longer wait for the
vendors; they let the vendors know what they expect to be in the latest release
of the devices or software.
3.3 Social Aspects
T his change in approach to
computing in general is an essential precursor to the other changes we have
seen in the more recent past, and which we now examine in more detail.
3.3.1 Web 2.0
M uch has been written about Web 2.0. There is a little
about it in Chap. 7 in
which we look at intelligent web systems. The key point is that the change from
Web 1.0 to 2.0 saw a change in approach from the web as solely a provider of
static information to a place for interaction with dynamic data. Web 2.0 is all
about allowing and encouraging users to interact with websites.
Of course Web 2.0 was with us before the term
cloud was fi rst used. Tim O’Reilly was
explaining, in his paper ‘Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software’, what Web 2.0 is in
2005.
Many people see cloud as post 2008. But there can be no doubt that cloud
has broadened the user-base of Web 2.0 applications and will continue to do so
as it too grows.
O’Reilly goes on to
suggest a Web 2.0-speci fi c marketing strategy:
…leverage customer-self service and
algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and
not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.
Amazon bookstore customers will recognise that
this is indeed their strategy and that they carry it out extremely
successfully.
Again, Amazon bookstore was with us well
before cloud. And yet, it is in the cloud: You can access it with only a
browser or even just with an e-book, and they provide you with services which
you pay for as and when you use them.
N ow, of course, with EC2, cloud
drive and S3, Amazon is heavily involved with aspects of the cloud that makes
them one of the leading service providers, not just a seller of books and CDs.
It
is probably in the fi eld of social
media and networking that the most change has happened as a result of fi rst Web 2.0 and the cloud.
Facebook, Myspace and its equivalents such as
Orkut are now part of everyday life for many. Twitter has also enjoyed a rapid
growth in popularity. These can all be seen as social phenomena that have
rooted themselves in the cloud, together with other ‘free’ services like Flickr
or Shutter fl y for storing and sharing your photographs and DropBox or Google
Drive for storing and sharing your fi
les.
In the chapter about data in the cloud, we
talk about the problems of perception of a lack of security that service
providers need to get over with their customers. Why would a sceptical
businessmen trust them with his data rather than having it where he can see
it—on his own system?
Interestingly, the success of the services
mentioned above just demonstrates that many people do not have a problem
trusting the likes of Google, Amazon, Shutter fl y Inc. and DropBox Inc. with
their personal information, photographs and other digital belongings. This
willingness to trust cloud services as an individual may just be that the scale
of the risk is seen as less to a person with their photographs than to a
business with their commercial secrets. But it may also be a precursor to an
overall change in mindset. The longer the young people using these services
continue to do so without problems, the more likely they are to become
decision-makers in organisations, meaning they may be more willing to take
‘risks’ with their corporate data and opt for cloud storage.
3.3.2 Society in the Clouds
S
ocial network services (SNSs) help people fi n d
others with common interests, background or affi l iations. They provide forums
for discussion and debate, exchange of photographs and other digital media and
personal news.
S ome of the established service
providers in this domain can boast some staggering fi g ures in terms of users
and usage. In June 2011, for example, there were, worldwide, 1 trillion
pageviews, as per Google’s report in support of their DoubleClick ad campaign (h
ttp://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/) .
Even more remarkable is that this fi gure was achieved from 880 million unique
visitors. That is almost three times the entire population of the US! It isn’t
far short of the population of India. There is only China that has a population
that is noticeably larger, and at the time of writing, Facebook was banned in
China. Further, this is bigger than the number of registered users, so
somewhere over 100 million nonregistered visitors are hitting Facebook via
advertisements and as a result of queries in search engines.
Professionals have their own SNS; LinkedIn,
with more than 100 million users worldwide, is seen by many as the place
to fi nd professional employment. Some
employers will only interview potential employees if they have a LinkedIn pro
fi le.
C yworld, the largest SNS in South
Korea, by 2005 had 10 million users, which was a staggering quarter of the
population of South Korea (Ahn et al. 2007) .
O ne US survey of over 900 teens came up
with these statistics (Lenhart and Madden
2007) :
1. More than
half (55%) of all of online American youths ages 12–17 use online social networking sites.
2. Further 91%
of all social networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently.
3. 82% use the
sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.
4. 72% of all
social networking teens use the sites to make plans with friends.
5. 49% use the
sites to make new friends.
The sheer scale of the user-base, together
with the modes of use, point to SNSs making a signi fi cant difference to the
way society works. In the way that cloud simpli fi es access to this sort of service,
this trend can only increase. Who knows how our society will change as a
result?
T
his is not to say that businesses aren’t
engaging with SNSs. The commonly quoted example is targeted marketing. Because
the target audience are identifying their own preferences, af fi liations and
interests, marketeers are able to get the message
3.4 Political Aspects
to only people who may be interested. This makes such
campaigns far more ef fi cient in terms of cost per response.
O ther parts of business too are
beginning to use SNS tools: Human relations and customer service, for example,
are departments that can easily benefi t
from using SNS to keep in touch with employees and customers alike.
Social media is far more than just SNS. More
than 1 billion photos and 40 million user-created videos had been uploaded and
contextually tagged in photo- and videosharing sites like YouTube and Flickr.
3.4 Political Aspects
Many commentators
are pointing to social media available from mobile communication devices as a
force for empowerment for entire populations. Futuristic novels in the past,
like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, have depicted those in power using ICT
technologies to monitor and control their populations. In actual fact, we are
seeing trends which indicate the reverse may be true, thanks to ubiquitous
cloudbased technologies.
U sing a variety of cloud tools,
people can rapidly come together to highlight, discuss and actively promote
solutions to specifi c issues. Pressure
groups form which can drive the political decision-making process or, at the
very least, give it a push in a particular direction. Political scientists
would point out that the sort of pluralist model that is encouraged can damage
a society’s political apparatus, but here we are just observing the phenomenon.
In the UK, there are many online pressure
groups, some not so obvious as others. One example of an effective advocacy
group is that of the mother’s lobby. As the Guardian reported in December 2008
(Pidd 2008
):
The global online poll of more than 27,000
people in 16 countries revealed that UK housewives spend 47% of their free time
surfi n g the Internet, compared with 39% for students around the world and 32%
for the unemployed.
As Gordon Brown, whilst he was Prime Minister,
observed, the group has more members than all UK political parties added
together. This has meant that politicians like to join in to try and get their
message across to a wider audience. Both Brown and Cameron have recently agreed
to do ‘live chat’ shows hosted by Mumsnet. The 2010 general election was even
called the Mumsnet election by some journalists, so prominent was the attention
politicians were paying to the site. But this very platform also provides the
potential to pressure politicians on particular issues.
I t isn’t always politicians that are
targeted. This is an excerpt from the Mumsnet’s ‘About us’ page ( http://www.mumsnet.com/info/aboutus ):
In January 2010, the Outdoor Advertising
Association pulled posters for a £1.25 million campaign that unwisely declared
‘Career women make bad mothers’ after an outcry and mass letter-writing
campaign on Mumsnet. The OAA issued a formal apology, stating: ‘We did not
intend to cause any offence’. The advertising agency responsible for the
campaign replaced the posters with new ones stating: ‘Sexist adverts damage us
all’.
M others are just one example. Many
other groups are springing up, in no small part because of the liberating
environment offered by the cloud. There are campaigning groups which support
anything from hospital patients to animal rights activists and many, many
others. In a list entitled ‘British Government and Politics on the Internet’, Keele
University School of Politics, International Relations and Philosophy identifi
e s hundreds of politically orientated sites ( http://www.keele.ac. uk/depts/por/ukbase.htm ).
The UK suffered from riots in a few centres in
August 2011. Many people quickly blamed Twitter as a major contributor,
claiming that messages incited the violence to continue. These riots had no
particular political focus, although the death of a Tottenham man at the hands
of the police was no doubt a catalyst.
Twitter was used extensively to spread the
news of the riots, as one would now expect of any newsworthy events. But after
the event, Professor Rob Procter of the University of Manchester, who led a
team of academics conducting an analysis of 2.6 million riot-related tweets,
found that:
Politicians and commentators were
quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and
organising riots, calling for sites such as Twitter to be closed should events
of this nature happen again. But our study has found no evidence of signifi c
ance in the available data that would justify such a course of action in
respect to Twitter. In contrast, we do
fi nd strong evidence that Twitter was a valuable tool for mobilising
support for the post-riot clean-up and for organising speci fi c clean-up
activities.
(Bell and Lewis
2011 )
Human nature being what it is, there will
certainly be some evil by-products, but we are already seeing how useful
Facebook can be in terms of exerting political pressure. As reported in the
medical journal The Lancet (June 2011) :
The Taiwan Society of Emergency Medicine has
been in slow-moving negotiation with the Department of Health for the past
several years over an appropriate solution to emergencyroom overcrowding. A
turning point was reached on Feb 8, 2011, when an emergency physician who was
an active social network user and popular blogger among the emergency-room
staff created a Facebook group called ‘Rescue the emergency room’.
Within a week about 1,500 people—most of the
emergency department staff around Taiwan—became members of this group and
started discussing actively and sharing their experiences. One of the members
then posted the group’s concerns and problems on the Facebook pro fi le of the
Taiwanese Minister of Health.
In
short, Facebook cut through bureaucratic obfuscation and made a positive change
happen.
In their 2009 EU-sponsored report, Public
Service 2.0: The Impact of Social Computing on Public Services, Huijboom et al.
suggest that the following may be future bene fi ts to accrue from the use of
social media in the political arena:
Transparency
• Social
computing applications may enhance transparency of citizen demand and gov ernment services and processes, as
public-sector information is easier to collect, structure and disseminate.
• This process
is likely to empower citizens to hold their public of fi cials to account.
3.4 Political Aspects
Citizen-centred and
user-generated services
• Forms of
social computing can stimulate the accessibility and personalisation of some public services because groups of
users are enabled to create those public services themselves or tailor them to
their preferences
Improvement of ef fi ciency
(cost/bene fi t)
• Social
computing trends may enhance the ef fi ciency of public value production as the
knowledge needed to create public
value can be built up effi c iently (e.g. effi c ient allocation)
I n terms of international
relations, online cooperation can remove both organisational and geographical
barriers, although there are still other barriers such as language which may be
more diffi c ult to overcome. Even language barriers may eventually be removed.
As a start, the Dudu social network is attempting to become a truly
multilingual SNS. The BBC’s Simon Atkinson
fi led this in October 2011 :
Billing itself as the world’s fi rst multilingual social network, Godudu
hopes to take on the likes of Facebook by offering real-time translation that
it says will allow people to communicate beyond language barriers.
There is some evidence that the recent Arab
Spring events have been at the very least supported by the use of social media.
Some commentators see SNSs as a key enabler. We do need to be cautious about
attributing too much to what is just a communications medium, however. There
does need to be an underlying sense of purpose or belief that can be called
upon in cloud-based campaigns.
Twitter as a large-scale political tool
was fi rst used during the 2009 Iranian
election. The highlight was when the US State Department asked social
networking site Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance to avoid disrupting
communications amongst tech-savvy Iranian citizens as they took to the streets
to protest at the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
This point is ably
exempli fi ed by Anderson et al. (2011) when she said:
I n Tunisia, protesters escalated
calls for the restoration of the country’s suspended constitution. Meanwhile,
Egyptians rose in revolt as strikes across the country brought daily life to a
halt and toppled the government.
And then she points out that the year being
described is 1919 and the media spreading the encouraging messages are
telegraph and newspapers. In other words, we should always remember that SNS is
only a communication channel and its advantage over previous channels is merely
its speed and popularity.
That being said, Twitter and Facebook were
very powerful tools to allow citizens to express their views and, almost as
importantly, to let the outside world know what was happening. In some
countries, these tools helped pile unstoppable pressure upon failing
governments. In others, with stronger, more authoritarian regimes, these sites
are dangerous places to be seen as Facebook spying is part of the
information-gathering process used by the regimes’ protectors.
Philosophical debates
abound at this time as to the signi fi cance of cloud or what is more generally
described as cyberspace. Does society need to control the cloud’s content, or
is society shaped by it? Sterner (2011) puts it thus:
One perspective generally holds
that cyberspace must be managed in such a way that conforms it to society’s
existing institutions, particularly in matters related to national security.
Another philosophy holds that cyberspace is fundamentally reordering society
and that, in doing so, it will unleash new possibilities in the story of human
liberty.
T he recent rise to prominence of
Wikileaks ( http://wikileaks.org/About.html ) has
certainly helped to focus minds in regimes used to the near certainty of their
information remaining secret. This organisation tends to polarise views. Their
declaration is that:
The broader principles on which our
work is based are the defence of freedom of speech and media publishing, the
improvement of our common historical record and the support of the rights of
all people to create new history. We derive these principles from the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. In particular, Article 19 inspires the work of our
journalists and other volunteers. It states that everyone has the right to
freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions
without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas
through any media and regardless of frontiers.
I f it was a simple as this,
however, they would not have caused such a furore as they have in even liberal
democracies. For example, as a result of sites like Wikileaks, US Secretary of
State Hilary Clinton, in a speech in February 2011, called for:
…‘a serious conversation’ about
rules to ensure an open Internet, noting it had helped power the pro-democracy
uprising in Egypt but also served as a tool for terrorists and repressive
governments. […]
She went on to say
that:
To maintain an Internet that
delivers the greatest possible benefi t s to the world, we need to have a
serious conversation about the principles that will guide us. What rules exist
– and should not exist – and why; what behaviors should be encouraged and
discouraged, and how.
These comments are as reported by Mary Beth
Sheridan in the Washington Post, Feb. 2011, in the
article Clinton calls for ‘serious conversation’ about Internet freedom.
Reporting in The Telegraph, in the UK, Robert
Winnett described the potential for Wikileaks to even affect the outcome of
wars. In July 2010
he wrote that:
Wikileaks published 90,000
documents – mostly reports detailing operations by American and other allied
forces in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009.
And that:
The Taliban has issued a warning to Afghans whose
names might appear on the leaked Afghanistan war logs as informers for the
Nato-led coalition.
H e goes on to report a high-ranking US
military man, Admiral Mike Mullen, as saying:
Mr Assange [Wikileak founder] can
say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are
doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of
some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.
3.5 Economic Aspects of Cloud Computing
And this was because
the leaked documents might reveal information about:
• Names
and addresses of Afghans cooperating with Nato forces
• Precise
GPS locations of Afghans
• Sources
and methods of gathering intelligence
The debate, at its
heart, seems to revolve around two key questions:
• Does
anyone in public life have the right to maintain secrets?
• Does
anyone have the right to put people’s lives at risk for the mere principle of
publishing everything it can?
The authors feel that this textbook is not the
place for our views. However, these issues are great as the subject matter for
debates and essays, as you will gather from the exercise session at the end of
this chapter.
A s an interesting footnote on
Wikileaks, they are clearly a cloud-based service provider which offers ‘…a
high security anonymous drop box fortifi e d by cuttingedge cryptographic
information technologies’. Moreover, they ‘operate a number of servers across
multiple international jurisdictions and we do not keep logs’. In this way they
are using the cloud to protect the anonymity of their contributors, even, to
some extent, from themselves. And yet, they too feel under threat from a
variety of agencies and are struggling to
fi nd the most secure cloud-based mechanisms to ensure theirs is a
secure system.
3.5 Economic Aspects of Cloud Computing
S ince economics can mean many different things, we will
confi n e ourselves to the de fi nition in Merriam-Webster:
A social science concerned chie fl
y with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and
consumption of goods and services.
Probably the most obvious possible
contribution to economic models comes from the globe-spanning, border-less
nature of cloud. The term globalisation has been with us for many years now and
describes the fact that the world’s economy is becoming increasingly
integrated. This is driven by relaxations in the fl o w of capital and moves
towards freer trade and the ability to utilise the cheapest labour possible,
wherever that is in the world, as opposed to being restricted to being tied to
the geographic location of a producer.
Cloud can accelerate
the globalisation trend in two distinct ways:
• By
enabling inter-organisational collaborations across borders.
• In
its own right, platform as a service allows the spread of services and software
without physical boundaries.
Since the former is covered in our Business
chapters (Part III), we will concentrate here upon the latter.
Globalisation of services, in just the same
way as many products now are, is fast becoming the norm. Whilst there may
always be a place for your local solicitor, fi n ancial advisor or accountant,
it is also true that these services are now available through the cloud in many
parts of the world.
One example can be found in accountancy,
where, in the UK, Liquid Accounts ( http://www.liquidaccounts.net/ ) offers:
…easy to use, UK-based online
accounting software for SME’s, accountants and bookkeepers from £20 per month
T his is clearly an example of a cloud
service with a monthly fee rather than an annual accounting fee and obviates
the need to buy accounting software.
There are many other such examples.
Accountancy is a well-established service industry. But then, so is the
creation of and implementation of software applications. The latter can gain
signifi c ant sales benefi t s and customer tie-in through the adoption of a
software or application as a service approach. Even the infrastructures that
allow cloud to work are a marketable service, as described in the Economist
magazine, February 2011:
LIKE oil or pork bellies, computing
capacity is now a tradable commodity. February 14th saw the launch of
SpotCloud, the world’s fi r st spot market for cloud computing. It works much
like other spot markets. Firms with excess computing capacity, such as data
centres, put it up for sale. Others, which have a short-term need for some
number-crunching, can bid for it.
Opportunities exist, then, for the service
sector to become truly global. When the service is not located in one
geographic location, barriers to trade can disappear. After all, the cloud
effectively hides data and application location behind their distributed
nature. If I buy some spare capacity at one service provider, who is to know?
Which nation’s laws will we need to follow, if any? Will I pay any traderelated
tax, such as value added tax (in the United Kingdom)?
And then, if the cloud is to become a big
free-trade market, it is likely to behave differently to the markets we are
more used to. For a start, there will be few economies of scale and few
barriers to entry. Anything your application can do, I can replicate in mine.
Whilst the large players will doubtless play on their premium quality brand
status, the others will need to be one of many smaller fi sh in a very big ocean. The cloud will
allow smaller companies of niche products to sell low-volume goods and services
in a cost-effective way. This effect is known as the long tail.
Furthermore, the very way that business is
carried out can change. Look, for example, at the changes to the business model
for selling music. The de facto norm of customers walking into a shop to buy a
CD is being replaced today with iPod and iPod-like environments where the
consumer has an unlimited selection and can buy just a single track, rather
than a full album.
P rior to this revolution, our
selection of music to purchase was typically based more upon what CDs were
physically available in the store you visit. In as much as Top 10 charts are
actually good indicators of popular taste, they were often actually driven by
supply push, rather than demand.
Without actual shelves, a retailer no longer
needs to worry about what is actually going to be pro fi table. Server space is
the only real barrier to the size of their stock. This means they can afford to
risk supplying unheard of artists at little cost to themselves. In turn this
has seen the business of recording change signi fi cantly. Some artists will
not even bother with contracts with traditional labels.
3.5 Economic Aspects of Cloud Computing
As well as this change brought about by one
innovative approach to selling music, we can expect to see many other changes
in all the entertainment industries. Film on Demand is already available in
some places. Technologies are already in place that mean that anyone can wake
up at 3 a.m. in the morning in more or less any country in the world and ‘rent’
the latest James Bond fi lm to try and
lull them back to sleep.
Although we have said it before, it is worth
reminding ourselves that these changes were not as a result of cloud computing
since many happened before 2008. However, the entertainment industry is just as
valid an application as a service as any other, and as cloud becomes more
widely adopted, it will doubtless add impetus to the existing changes in the
way we do business.
O ther changes can begin to occur
when the cloud approach is adopted. Sellers of services and applications are
less liable to cash fl ow problems since
payments are regularly coming from customers (or they don’t get the service!)
The 30-day (which can mean 90 real days) payment problem which hampers many
businesses disappears.
C osts to market are also likely to
be less, especially for the niche software provider. They will be renting space
from providers, rather than having to fi n d up-front investment into hardware.
Many service providers allow free, or very cheap, access to services in the
development phase, thus supporting product creation.
A ll this means that the way we do
business generally would be affected by the changes in methods of working as a
consequence of broad adoption of cloud computing. There are, however, signifi c
ant barriers to complete globalisation. Not least of these is that a large
proportion of the world’s population do not have access to the Internet.
India was recently quoted as having 100
million Internet users ( http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm
) which is a massive market by anyone’s standards. But it still leaves more
than 9/10th of the nation’s population unable to gain any benefi t s from
cloud. A good many of those Indians do, however, have access to mobile phones.
Mobile aware cloud is clearly going to be a very import part of the growth of
cloud-based economics.
Governments, many of whom are early adopters
of cloud technology, will play a large part in the way that cloud is adopted
worldwide. As Kushida et al. (2011) say:
As with the previous computing
platforms – mainframes, PCs, and networks of PCs – cloud computing is becoming
a baseline for national and corporate IT infrastructure against which other
forms of infrastructure and service delivery must be measured. In this respect
it is likely that cloud computing will become an important component of
national critical infrastructure. Control of cloud infrastructure will matter
to national governments.
Breznitz et al. (2011) point
out that:
According to the prevailing
economic thinking, public policies should set market-friendly ‘rules of the
game’ and then stay out of the way. This fantasy is far from an apt description
of the world, whether in the fi nancial
sector or in the ICT domain…
T his leads us to one of the
biggest uncertainties for cloud computing adopters: the legal and accounting
frameworks they will be expected to work in. Legal aspects of the cloud are
investigated in more detail in the Business and Law chapter, but the operating
framework for a company whose product is in essence everywhere around the globe
is a tricky one. The current international trading regulations were not built
for border-free trade. This has to be a case of watch this space.
3.6 Cloud and Green IT
G reen IT can mean many different things to many people.
Just to clarify, in this section we will be looking at how cloud might assist
organisations in their quest to save power costs of a variety of sorts.
Sometimes this is referred to as sustainable IT.
Worrying about ef fi ciency of our computing
devices is not new and certainly predates cloud computing. The 1992 Energy Star
programme was an international attempt to help organisations select more ef fi
cient computers and monitors. It became, and still is, an important way to
inform purchasing decisions for a broad range of electrical goods.
C oncerns about climate change have
helped move Green IT up the agenda for many governments and organisations.
Recently we began to see Board-level appointments, demonstrating the importance
that companies are now placing on sustainability. In 2009, for example, Siemens
appointed a Chief Sustainability Offi c er (CSO) to their management board. The
press release states:
E ffi c ient sustainability
management requires clear structures and a consistent integration of the
sustainability strategy in our company’s organisation. Here we have taken
another important step at Siemens with the appointment of Managing Board member
Barbara Kux as Chief Sustainability Offi c er. The Sustainability Offi c e
ensures that our sustainability activities are closely interconnected with the
operating units.
O bviously, the remit here is far
greater than just computing, but since a sizeable portion of a typical
organisation’s electricity bill is as a direct result of computing, this is an
area that will doubtless be an important area for investigation for any CSO.
A nother sign of the importance of
sustainability is the prominence of the subject on consultancy websites. The
big players all have Green IT expertise and are able to offer help on reducing
carbon footprints. An example of how sustainability is now part of the
marketing message can be seen by reviewing the interesting Green Cube, which is
on the CapGemini site: http://www.capgeminigreen.com/greencube
. You could review some of the case studies on this site.
S ome may wonder what all the fuss
is about. After all, our laptops hardly use any energy do they? But the large
servers that support an organisation’s systems actually do cost a large
proportion of an organisation’s carbon footprint. Studies suggest that an
average server can run at only 15% effi c iency. If that is the case, it means
many organisations could probably run one server instead of fi ve separate ones, making huge energy
savings. Typically, server power can account for 25% of total corporate IT
budgets, and their costs are expected to continue to increase as the number of
servers rise and the cost of electricity increases faster than revenues.
3.6 Cloud and Green IT
T his is a strong argument for
virtualisation. This technology allows you to run several virtual servers on
one actual server. One of the main arguments used in the sale of virtualisation
products such as VMWare and Hypervisor is this potential saving.
I f you are an organisation in this
position, it may be relatively easy, therefore, to combine servers using
virtualisation and thence save energy. Although we have said in our chapter on
underpinning technologies that virtualisation is key to cloud computing, we
might still ask how cloud might help in the search for sustainability.
Smaller businesses do not necessarily have the
computing needs to enable a server to be running at full effi c iency. And this
is where cloud helps: Many companies share the resources of the service
provider’s infrastructure. The service providers will be seeking to run as ef
fi ciently as possible as this will directly affect their bottom-line pro fi
tability.
As well as the hardware bene fi ts, there are
carbon savings to be found in cloud applications. The major advantage of many
cloud tools, starting from Google Drive innovative approach to shared
documents, is the built-in collaborative working. A plethora of business tasks
are now available in the cloud allowing travel-free collaboration. Examples
include brainstorming, mind mapping, systems design and process design.
T here exist many cloud-based tools
that can reduce an organisations costs and carbon footprint. Think, for
example, of the air miles saved when geographically remote businesses work
together using Skype or any of the other collaboration tools. Salespeople
sending data back to their base through cloud systems no longer have to plan
journeys around the need to have time in the of fi ce, but rather can plan the
most ef fi cient routes.
Is cloud, then, inherently better for the
planet? We do need to be careful when jumping to this sort of conclusion. There
may be other factors to consider when balancing overall good. Moreover, there
are many business drivers in IT infrastructure decisions, and greenness is
often not paramount amongst them.
O ne argument might be that IT
itself is inherently a non-sustainable addition to any process. Picture an of
fi ce using green pens and recycled paper for their processes, with paper
moving by foot or bicycle. Now compare that to the typical offi c e today:
Paperless turns out to be a largely unachievable dream, so the paper still
exists, but we also have expensive to create machinery which contains toxic
substances, contributes to a high proportion of an organisation’s energy bills,
and which will need to be disposed of as waste in 3–5 years time.
We
need to be conscious of what are the real arguments for and against
sustainability in IT. Sustainability is used as a marketing buzzword in IT.
Moreover, there is the problem of general
awareness. When driving a car many people now realise that it is more fuel ef
fi cient not to accelerate and brake harshly and to reduce the average speed
you travel at. How many of us, however, think about the extra disk reads and
CPU usage caused by just playing around with data? The costs are hidden.
So where are the
costs? One paper (Brill 2007) suggests that:
The largely invisible costs of providing power,
cooling and environmental site support infrastructure are increasing far faster
than the performance gained from buying new servers.
The paper continues
by projecting that:
…the 3-year cost of powering and
cooling servers (OpEx + amortized CapEx) is currently 1.5 times the cost of
purchasing server hardware. Future projections extending out to 2012 show this
multiplier increasing to 22 times the cost of the hardware under worst case
assumptions and to almost three times under even the best-case assumptions.
(Brill 2007)
The fi
nancial aspects of investment appraisal are discussed in Chap. 8 . Here we will just explore what
this means in terms of sustainability. Other papers, as outlined by Ruth (2009), suggest that IT infrastructure accounts for
about 3% of global electricity usage and of greenhouse gasses. Gartner et al. (
2007) suggested the level of CO 2 emissions
from IT was running at about 2% and that equals the contribution of the
aviation industry, which has historically had much bad press from the green
lobbies. To help with scale, Schmidt et al.
(2009) point out that worldwide power
consumption by servers approximately equates to the consumption of the whole of
the polish economy.
W hether or not there is a proven
case for IT’s claims to enhance productivity, it is clearly here to stay, at
least in the short-to-medium term. The green pen and paper is not often
considered as a serious alternative when organisations look to improve their
systems. So the thrust has to be making IT as green as possible.
Governments across the globe are creating
measures to cut carbon emissions by industry, but some of the measures may seem
to be unfair to rapidly expanding data centre businesses. As the Financial
Times reported (2011)
:
Information technology companies
are becoming reluctant to build big data centres in the UK because of
uncertainties and additional costs created by the government’s carbon reduction
commitments.
W hilst there may be a net increase
in effi c iency through the shutting of many inef fi cient small data centres,
those smaller centres belonging to SMEs are often less harshly hit by the
measures than the large centres. Moreover, in continuing to offer this
amalgamation service, the large centres increase in size and therefore in
energy usage year on year. Since government measures often rank businesses
according to their success in reducing carbon, this expansion could be costly
in terms of levies.
A s we have seen elsewhere in this
book, cloud computing can have signifi c antly different meanings. A small
company which uses a private cloud is likely to have a signi fi cantly
different power usage per user than a large organisation which uses entirely a
public cloud. Moreover, some organisations will be using software as a service,
whilst others will be more closely tied to the service provider and adopt an
infrastructure as a service approach.
With this in mind, it is perhaps too
simplistic to make claims about cloud computing’s green credentials.
Intuitively it may seem that combining processing is bound to improve ef fi
ciency. But we are in danger of forgetting that there is a cost of a globalised
approach to data storage in terms of transporting the data. Far more energy
sapping switching and routing is required to put and get data than might be the
case if your data is stored on your own PC or local server.
3.8 Extended Study Activities
One detailed study
by Baliga et al. (2010) suggests:
under some circumstances cloud computing can consume
more energy than conventional computing where each user performs all computing
on their own personal computer (PC).
As that paper goes on to suggest, optimum
greenness will probably be a result of a mixture of approaches rather than
simply going for one single approach:
Signi fi cant energy savings are
achieved by using low-end laptops for routine tasks and cloud processing
services for computationally intensive tasks, instead of a midrange or high-end
PC, provided the number of computationally intensive tasks is small.
So it is clear that the jury is out at the
minute about how Green Cloud actually is. Governments continue to attempt to
reduce our carbon outputs, and it may well be that legislation is the single
biggest driver in the use, or not, of cloud towards green ends.
3.7 Review Questions
The answers to these
questions can be found in the text of this chapter.
1. How
has the public reaction to ICT in general changed over the past few decades?
How will those changes help, or hinder, the adoption of cloud?
2. What
impact has Web 2.0 had on the way society interacts with technology?
3. Give
an example of how a social networking tool has been used to apply political
pressure on decision-makers.
4. Describe
ways that cloud-based technologies are likely to accelerate the trend to
globalisation.
5. Explain
how the virtualisation that may be involved in cloud platforms might help
reduce energy consumption.
3.8 Extended Study Activities
These
activities require you to research beyond the contents of this book and can be
approached individually for the purposes of self-study or used as the basis of
group work.
3.8.1 Discussion Topic 1
H ow much impact did cloud computing have upon what has
been described as The Arab Spring? When answering this question, you might like
to start by attempting to defi n e what is meant by cloud in this case. You can
debate whether you consider social networking technologies as part of the
cloud.
3.8.2 Discussion Topic 2
I s cloud computing inherently better for the planet? A
starting point here is the section in this chapter, but as you will see, there
are arguments for and against this proposition, and there is much information
in the public domain that could help you form a reasoned judgement on this
question.
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