Summary
The growth of the cloud has been truly astonishing. In less than fifteen years, it has become part of everyday life and casual conversations about moving photos and other data into the cloud. Omnipresent advertisements at airports, on buses, and on websites further embed the term in society’s collective consciousness. Tech companies report multiple billions of dollars in revenues, increasingly driven by their cloud businesses. Even the Pentagon is betting on the cloud with its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract.1 By 2020, the overall cloud services market is expected to be $266.4 billion, a 17 percent increase compared to 2019.2
The coronavirus pandemic has revealed how important the cloud is for bolstering societal resilience. 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 [the current] pace.”3 In the wake of the pandemic’s initial outbreak and the accompanying…
