An interesting future research objective would be to revisit this CBA when enforceable environmental laws applicable to the ICT sectors are enacted. A change in the European legislative landscape including the Carbon Trading Scheme, and the introduction of effective tax incentives for those enterprises that comply with the EC Code of Conduct requirements, will affect the result of the financial analysis with respect to the quantification and monetary valuation of the environmental benefits. I think it is important to keep an eye on the enactment of similar environmental laws in the US and in emerging countries like India and China because these fast-growing economies are concerning prospects of GHG emission increases. To echo Greenpeace's concerns about cloud computing's possible negative impact on the environment, it may prove of capital importance to dig further into the issue of how big the cloud really is when it comes to electricity consumption and GHG emissions and how big it will become given its rapid growth and given that many major cloud brands refuse to disclose their energy footprint.
Another issue worth investigating further concerns the extent to which European economies are becoming increasingly dependable upon US-centric firms like Google and Microsoft for the procurement of computing resources when the cloud as a utility computing grid becomes ubiquitous.
A corollary business sustainability issue related to the widespread use of cloud computing for the firm's business processes resides in the diffuse control of the Internet as the broadband conduit linking datacenters together, and the relative fragility of its architecture. Lawrence G. Roberts, one of the founders of the Internet, says, in an address to the IEEE organization, that the Internet is broken, and that network routers are too slow, costly, and power hungry (Roberts 2009). Today's Internet traffic is rapidly expanding and also becoming more varied and complex in particular due to an explosion in voice and video traffic. The shift is not without causing problems, he says, even though everybody is using Skype or YouTube today without too much of a hitch, because the packet switching technology at the heart of the Internet's TCP/IP protocol was not designed for that type of application. Packet switching routers around the world are becoming increasingly congested, causing quality of service deteriorations. This may not be perceivable today because the Internet has been grossly over-provisioned by network operators who have deployed mountains of optical fibers during the dot-com era, but at the current rate of growth, cloud computing combined with the massive arrival of the iPad, iPhone, netbooks and other tablet computers, may put the viability of the Internet at risk. The resulting effects would be devastating for those enterprises who rely heavily on cloud computing to perform their business operations.
Another issue worth investigating further concerns the extent to which European economies are becoming increasingly dependable upon US-centric firms like Google and Microsoft for the procurement of computing resources when the cloud as a utility computing grid becomes ubiquitous.
A corollary business sustainability issue related to the widespread use of cloud computing for the firm's business processes resides in the diffuse control of the Internet as the broadband conduit linking datacenters together, and the relative fragility of its architecture. Lawrence G. Roberts, one of the founders of the Internet, says, in an address to the IEEE organization, that the Internet is broken, and that network routers are too slow, costly, and power hungry (Roberts 2009). Today's Internet traffic is rapidly expanding and also becoming more varied and complex in particular due to an explosion in voice and video traffic. The shift is not without causing problems, he says, even though everybody is using Skype or YouTube today without too much of a hitch, because the packet switching technology at the heart of the Internet's TCP/IP protocol was not designed for that type of application. Packet switching routers around the world are becoming increasingly congested, causing quality of service deteriorations. This may not be perceivable today because the Internet has been grossly over-provisioned by network operators who have deployed mountains of optical fibers during the dot-com era, but at the current rate of growth, cloud computing combined with the massive arrival of the iPad, iPhone, netbooks and other tablet computers, may put the viability of the Internet at risk. The resulting effects would be devastating for those enterprises who rely heavily on cloud computing to perform their business operations.
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