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Cheung, Anne S.Y.; Weber, Rolf H. --- "Introduction: a walk in the clouds" [2015] ELECD 745; in Cheung, S.Y. Anne; Weber, H. Rolf (eds), "Privacy and Legal Issues in Cloud Computing" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015) 1

Book Title: Privacy and Legal Issues in Cloud Computing

Editor(s): Cheung, S.Y. Anne; Weber, H. Rolf

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783477067

Section Title: Introduction: a walk in the clouds

Author(s): Cheung, Anne S.Y.; Weber, Rolf H.

Number of pages: 7

Extract:

Introduction: a walk in the clouds
Anne S.Y. Cheung and Rolf H. Weber

Cloud computing is fast becoming an integral part of daily life, with
people's activities in the physical world or on personal computers
increasingly moving to web-based services `up in the cloud'. The cloud
allows us to access our documents, photos, and video files from
anywhere in the world. Many of us are customers of Dropbox and
Google, amongst other cloud service providers.1 Be it online searching,
media streaming or WhatsApping, we are all in the cloud. In addition,
many businesses have purchased computing resources through cloud
service providers rather than acquiring their own physical IT assets. The
ubiquity of the cloud is also attracting considerable research attention,
with researchers from academic and research institutions carrying out
investigations into various aspects of cloud computing, from ensuring the
efficient and effective use of such computing to infrastructure issues,
cloud service models and cloud security. Leading IT analyst firm Gartner
claims that by 2016,2 cloud computing will account for the bulk of all
new IT spending, whereas consulting firm McKinsey estimates that the
total annual economic impact of cloud technology could reach US$6.2
trillion by 2025.3 Furthermore, according to McKinsey, most of that
impact ($1.2­5.5 trillion) could take the form of the additional surplus

1
Dropbox reports that its number of users reached 300 million in May 2014.
See Kaylene Hong, `Dropbox Reaches 300m Users, Adding on 100m Users ...