From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 74

global marketplace, software designers, application developers, business-
service providers, and telecommunications companies. But there is another
side to this success story. China faces technical challenges, including con-
nectivity problems and the absence of certiication programs for cloud
companies and their staff, something that has been institutionalized
among leading companies like Amazon. Moreover, as Chapter 4 describes,
cloud computing faces numerous environmental, social, and labor chal-
lenges. These are all greatly heightened by the size and speed of cloud
development in China, as well as by the unsettled nature of its political
and legal infrastructure (Qian 2013).
Cloud computing creates signiicant environmental problems associated
with its massive energy requirements and, secondarily, with construction
and disposal of materials and equipment. These are all exacerbated in
China because the country is already plagued by widespread air pollution
as energy needs have spiked across the country, and reliance on coal-ired
power plants deepens the problem. Building the world's largest cloud
facilities, including entire cloud cities, will only add to an already critical
problem. The same holds for security, surveillance, and privacy issues.
These pose challenges everywhere, but nowhere more prominently than
in China, where there is no guarantee that if they build it, the world will
come. China has long been mired in controversies about the security of
personal and organizational data. Will Western companies and govern-
ments that have complained about the theft of data store their information
in China's data centers? A society that practices massive surveillance of its
own citizens and routinely censors information can hardly be surprised
to ind very low trust in the security of its cloud systems. It is not only
foreign businesses that worry about surveillance issues. A 2013 Forrester
Research report documented concerns among Chinese entrepreneurs who
are reluctant to take to the cloud. Some of this results from the lack of
experience with outsourcing or externally managed services. With little to
prepare them for the cloud, companies are understandably cautious. But
security worries loom large and this accounts for a distinct preference for
private-cloud services as the less risky cloud option (Qing 2013). Finally,
China's hyper-accelerated industrialization has created massive labor
problems that include but extend well beyond the notorious practices of
the electronics manufacturer Foxconn. Annually producing 200,000 sci-
entists and engineers in one city alone is an outstanding achievement, but