Do you live in the cloud ... yet?

In This Article:

- How Cloud computing is changing corporate America and consumers alike

It is interesting to observe  the trend of America's workforce accepting more and more the usage of data and software packages in the 'cloud'. Essentially that means your software programs are not installed on your personal machine and  even your data is resting on a hard drive somewhere in Kansas. As for your computing, you are using software applications simply as a user client from providers like Google for instance.

Looking ahead into the year 2020, 71% of IT experts forecast that most of the business will be done through such cloud computing applications and not the traditional software-on-your-drive way as this article from IEEE suggests. Quite timely UC Berkeley, a huge research campus on the west coast, today announced to switch their entire campus' email and calendar software from currently Microsoft's Office to a Google-App's in 2012. It seems that the seamless collaboration among students, staff, researchers and guests is favoring the open-source (and most of all free) Google solution. 

Google vs. Apple vs. Microsoft vs. ...

Personally, I can relate to this as I switched myself from using Outlook for the last 10 years to Google products now. While for large institutions like UC Berkeley costs and feasibility are likely to be main drivers, for me streamlining my laptop and smart-phone regarding calendar and email were key. Thus, I believe for many users the Google products are simply 'good-enough' and are free on top. Such integrated solutions from Google (Gmail, calender, Google-docs, G-maps, Google+...) and Apple (hardware + own OS + iTunes,...) provide user friendly integrity while seemingly stand-alone software like Microsoft is appears to be cumbersome and expensive. Interestingly, policy figures have recognized the potential of being present in the cloud as well. Steven Chu, U.S.'s  secretary of energy, for instance frequently updates his Facebook account, thus he is present and somewhat close and reachable though the cloud.  

Cyber Security - The New Hot Job

Within this context it becomes evident that the traditional software selling and using way is critically challenged by the main-stream user preference for cloud access. For special institutions and entities like security related businesses, governmental agencies and certainly the military pure cloud solutions are often not secure enough. Yet, even the military relies more and more on data exchange, and with no doubt there are specially secured cloud-like applications being used now already. Thus, it comes to no surprise that especially in the computer and electrical engineering domain cyber security jobs are exploding. In fact the cyber security market is estimated to deliver a market potential between 2010-2015 of (accumulated) $55 Billion and is growing quickly with 6.2$ CAGR suggested by this article. With this growing trend the cyber security market will be 1% of the U.S.'s GDP annually and thereby demonstrates its national and global significance.


However, with all the benefits from cloud computing it is quiet easy to envision situations where legal rights are infringed and our current policy frameworks are outdated. Such strong societal shifts in the way we interact, work and do business require actions for updating our legislative and legal regulatory rather soon than later.