The saga of Edward Snowden and his revelations about the NSA have had a large impact on the concerns of American security. Many companies are rethinking their use of American cloud computing options – and it may be to the benefit of IT jobs in Canada.
Trend is not your friend
Many have raised serious concerns in the wake of Snowden's revelations, and one recent study found they could have a profound impact on the profits of cloud companies in America. Cloud Security Alliance ran a survey of American cloud providers shortly after Snowden's information was revealed in The Guardian, and found that 56 per cent of respondents believed the disclosures would cause them to lose business from outside of the U.S., according to Information Week.
From there, Daniel Castro, an analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Institute, used that number to construct an estimate of what that could mean in lost revenue. In total, he estimated, it would mean that $35 billion could be lost. The news did not get any better for these businesses – shortly thereafter, James Staten, lead cloud analyst at Forrester Research, reviewed the report, and believed it could have underestimated the losses.
Good news for Canada
Yet what's bad for some of those in IT jobs in North America could be beneficial of those in Canada. Canadian cloud companies stand to gain greatly, according to Robert Half, CEO of the Canadian Cloud Council. Half believes that, although the revelations were not surprising to him, they have completely rattled faith in U.S. storage of information. It will become nearly impossible for U.S. companies now to sell Canadian operations on that most fundamental principle of the cloud – that it does not matter where your data is hosted, because it is safe in the cloud. Instead, if it is hosted in the U.S., American authorities may be checking it out at all times.
Half believes that the cloud's abilities to boost business practices cannot be underestimated – as such, he calls it "the second industrial revolution." Yet when companies have to worry about privacy, they hold back. CIO's are extremely concerned about the loss of data and intellectual property, so they will certainly be hesitant to move to American servers – but they can not forsake the cloud. Instead, it may be time for those in IT consulting in Canada to show them the right way is here at home.
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