By Charles Arthur, The Guardian
Thursday, August 8, 2013 18:49 EDT
American technology businesses fear they could lose between $21.5bn and $35bn in cloud computing contracts worldwide over the next three years, as part of the fallout from the NSA revelations.
Some US companies said they have already lost business, while UK rivals said that UK and European businesses are increasingly wary of trusting their data to American organisations, which might have to turn it over secretly to the National Security Agency, its government surveillance organisation.
One British executive, Simon Wardley at the Leading Edge Forum thinktank, celebrated the publication of the information about the NSA’s spying and its Prism data collection program: “Do I like Prism … yes, and god bless America and the NSA for handing this golden opportunity to us,” he wrote on his blog. “Do I think we should be prepared to go the whole hog, ban US services and create a €100bn investment fund for small tech startups in Europe to boost the market … oh yes, without hesitation.”
Reports of the pervasive spying apparatus and programs is having a chilling effect on American businesses that build or rely on cloud-type systems which are systematically trolled by the N$A technologies.
People, apparently, are not that thrilled to store their personal stuff "in the cloud' with ongoing revelations that the US Government and N$A are 'drilling down" threough their stuff and recoding all manner of metadata. Business is ripe for those who can deliver a secure system in which they feel protected from this sort of intrusion.
“People talk to us and want their own private cloud service, because they know we don’t have that sort of relationship with the government,” Fletcher said. “They want all the services to be based in the UK, rather than using Google or Amazon Web Services.”
It is a good, informative article - for those not simply averse to reading a foreign entity like the Guardian.
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Requisite pie fights here and here
Please contain them there, thanks.