Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 179

dominant producer of genetically modiied seed. In 2013 the company
spent $930 million to purchase a Silicon Valley start-up that uses big data
to carry out weather and climate analysis (McDuling 2013).
These developments demonstrate the dynamic relationship between
big data and cloud computing. Cloud companies that might have been
satisied to limit their business to providing data storage and applications
now have a strong incentive to make use of data to sell additional services
to customers and to develop new products of their own. But this does not
just offer economic advantages. It also raises questions about the rights
and responsibilities of cloud companies. Some companies and individuals
might wonder why data they expected was only going to be stored in the
cloud is instead being used by cloud companies to seek inancial gain.
Such activity might beneit a customer who stands to share in the added
value, but it will also expose customer data to uses that were not antici-
pated. Moreover, as the cloud continues its inexorable global expansion,
the storage facility is increasingly likely to be located in the jurisdiction
of another country whose government will apply its own rules, regula-
tions, and policies. In 2013 Microsoft took signiicant steps toward such
a relationship with China, a development that prompted warnings about
dire consequences from experts on Sino-American relations (Ragland et
al. 2013). The economic synergies touted for the cloud and big data can
easily produce signiicant political complications.
It is therefore now essential to consider big data in a comprehensive
assessment of cloud computing and especially to assess its way of knowing.
The cloud received a boost when the National Institute of Standards and
Technology provided a generally accepted deinition, but the same has not
been the case for big data. Among the many circulating, the Wikipedia
entry is a reasonably good one: “In information technology, big data is
a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes dificult
to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data
processing applications.” 1 The authors of a 2013 book on the subject
refer to it as “the ability of society to harness information in novel ways
to produce useful insights or goods and services of signiicant value”
(Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013, 2).
Like the cloud, big data has often generated a rapturous response from
its supporters, with one of the most sober accounts noting that “it has
become de rigeur to ascribe all sorts of supernatural powers to Big Data”