What is the impact of governments on how quickly the cloud evolves to meet enterprise requirements?
The cloud has evolved out of the consumerization of information technologies. A key part of this evolution is that information technologies are delivered cheaply, on demand and at massive scale, to consumers. For example, Yahoo has more than a quarter of a billion e-mail accounts. The problem for large enterprises is that they often have – or believe they have – requirements that are not met by consumerized technology providers. In comparison with the consumer market, big enterprises are just a niche market. This is why consumerized technology providers have been slow to address the needs of big enterprises and unwilling to negotiate separate contracts. Governments are now playing an important role in this market. The recent economic crisis has forced governments to look for new ways to operate. This has made them more open to consumerized technologies, and the government market is big enough to attract the attention of cloud companies such as Google and Amazon. This is starting to cha
