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The WEF report is promotional in part because it completely ignores
results like this. Instead, not unlike the commercial advertisements
described earlier, it chooses to focus on the cloud as a source of intelligence
that turns ineficient businesses into smart organizational machines. The
key is the ability of cloud computing to perfect the process of convergence,
which, over the history of communication technology, has advanced the
connections between the production, dissemination, and use of informa-
tion. For the WEF, this is the heart of the matter: “Cloud computing ser-
vices provide a catalyst for ICT convergence. Telecommunications carriers
will gradually move IT systems and Internet data centers into the cloud,
and telecommunications and IT industries will develop uniform standards
to facilitate rapid cloud development” (Dutta and Bilbao-Osorio 2012,
xiv). The cloud is important not only because of its superior storage and
processing power, suficient to absorb the Internet and all of today's IT,
but also because it provides the missing link enabling telecommunica-
tions providers to serve the entire world faster, more cheaply, and more
eficiently than ever. As a result of joining the “pipe” and the “device” in
what is close to a literal cloud of convergence, “the cloud has reshaped the
IT industry” (ibid., 38). But this, as the report recognizes, is too simple.
It may be promotional, but this is not a slick commercial during which
someone announces, “To the Cloud,” and, with the snap of the ingers,
transports us to a world of seamless integration and sublime convergence.
Instead it is the report of a well-respected international organization,
which needs to avoid the appearance of the myth-making that is taken
for granted in thirty-second commercials.
So in addition to promoting the wonders of IT in general and the
cloud in particular, the document acknowledges that “there are obstacles
to this integration, including insuficient openness in the ICT industry; a
lack of uniied technical standards; and a lack of connection among cloud
computing, telecommunications networks (the pipe), and smart devices.
Overcoming these obstacles and unifying ICT's technical standards is a top
priority if we are to improve interoperability within the industry” (ibid.,
ix). For the WEF, the major problem facing the future of IT and cloud
computing is not the environmental consequences of building enormous
data centers around the world and powering them with several levels of
backup, including banks of spinning lywheels and thousands of lead-acid
batteries. It is not the potential to violate privacy built into a system that
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