The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 9

the World Economic Forum adds to the legitimacy of the cloud as the
leading-edge force for the expansion of the world economy. The chapter
concludes by examining two more vital elements in this circuit of promo-
tion, lobbying, and trade shows. For most of its history, especially since
the development of the Internet, the information-technology industry has
not invested signiicant resources to lobby Washington. In recent years,
but especially with the growth of social media and the cloud, all of that
has changed, and Chapter 3 demonstrates the importance of lobbying at
the local, national, and international levels of power. Finally, trade shows
and conferences bring the major cloud and big-data players together to
promote their products, the industry, and the myth of the cloud as a
transcendent force to solve the world's problems. This section draws from
my participation in the largest annual cloud-computing conference and
sales event, Cloud Computing Expo 2013 in New York City.
Chapter 4 explains why a massive promotional effort is essential. Cloud
computing faces serious problems because it puts great stress on the envi-
ronment, requires signiicant power supplies, threatens privacy, is dificult
to secure, and challenges the future of IT work. These problems, under-
standably, receive little attention in the promotional accounts addressed
in Chapter 3. When discussed, they are typically dismissed out of hand
or framed in the context of how to counter arguments against moving
to the cloud because of these problems. Chapter 4 demonstrates why,
contrary to the claims made in the promotional culture, it is important
to give them careful attention.
Cloud companies promise, and their customers expect, that data centers
will operate with no down time. This alone makes enormous demands on
the electrical grid, but the demand increases substantially because servers
require a constant source of cooling to avoid overheating. Moreover, 24/7
operation makes it necessary to build backup power sources like diesel
generators and chemical batteries that create signiicant environmental
problems for the communities that host data centers. Moving to the
cloud is far from entering the ethereal, weightless, and green environ-
ment that the image of the physical cloud and the mythology of cloud
computing suggest. The next dark cloud to appear, in Chapter 4, is the
threat to privacy and security. After examining a range of ways to think
about privacy and security, it takes up three major problems, starting with
the multiplication of hacking attacks against cloud computing systems