Transcript

MR. WEST: Good morning, I'm Darrell West. I'm vice president of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and I'd like to welcome you to our forum on Cloud Computing for Business and Society. And I want to start with an audience survey. You know, it's always interesting to see how an audience feels about things and the question is, how many of you feel like you know what cloud computing is? Raise your hands. Okay, how many of you don't really know much about cloud computing? And then, how many of you actually served in the military and were taught never to raise your hand for anything? Okay, there are two or three in that category.

Well, this is a surprisingly well-informed audience, I guess no big surprise given the fact that it is an event on cloud computing, but I'm always amazed when I talk with people outside the technology area. Everybody has heard the term "cloud computing," but there are many people who don't really understand what it is. It's a bit of a mysterious term in terms of what it is and what its impact is going to be on society, business, and government.

So, the simple definition of cloud computing is that it represents a platform for the delivery of software services and other applications through remote file servers. Rather than storing and accessing information from your desktop, data, information, and software are placed on remote servers and are accessible wherever you happen to be. It includes many things that I'm sure people in this room already use -- Facebook, YouTube, Internet e-mail programs, ordering books through Amazon, or paying bills online through your financial institution.

But I think the key thing about cloud computing is not just that it represents a new platform, but how this new approach to data storage and service access affects the entire computing ecosystem. I think it changes how we think about computing, how organizations function, how consumers access information, and how much technology costs.

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