While global commerce and communications benefit greatly from the widespread use of cloud services, dependence on the cloud exposes individuals and organizations to new risks and exacerbates old ones. As a result, it is attracting scrutiny and regulation. To avoid rushed, ill-conceived, or counter-productive regulatory approaches to the cloud, concerned players must recognize the interconnections and tradeoffs across issue areas. Carnegie’s Cloud Governance Project offers a holistic, first-of-its-kind framework for understanding and addressing a wide range of interrelated cloud policy issues across the following strategic areas:

• Security and Robustness
• Resilience
• Consumer and Enterprise Protection
• Prosperity and Sustainability
• Human and Civil Rights

This framework was first outlined in a November 2020 paper. It has since has been expanded and refined through independent research and extensive, ongoing engagement with high-level corporate and government stakeholders, from the EU, India, U.S., and beyond.

Navigating This Website

The complexity of cloud policy issues and the depth of their connections required us to envision a new model for presenting our analysis. This website enables users to explore the policy implications of cloud computing in areas of interest and at the level of complexity they desire. Each page can also be viewed and downloaded in PDF form by clicking on the printer icon in the upper right.

The website contains four major sections:

• The Prominent Concerns page organizes the anxieties motivating cloud regulation into skimmable bullets.
• The Governance Issues page includes an interactive tool (not available on mobile devices) that allows users to see the connections between various cloud governance issues. Users can also jump quickly to the issues of greatest interest. Each issue is presented in a standard form template that highlights major challenges, outlines the perspectives and interests of key stakeholders, and explores potential pathways forward.
• The Stakeholders page offers quick access to a list of potential steps cloud stakeholders may consider when trying to make progress on the individual cloud governance issues
• The Macro Issues page presents an analysis of topics that span four or five of the strategic areas. Items in this section do not follow the standard form template but include a discussion of key considerations and, where appropriate, potential ways forward.

About the Project

Below find several resources you can use to learn more about the project, its authors, and Carnegie’s broader cloud-oriented research.

Authors and Acknowledgements — Meet our team, contributors, and funders.

What is the Cloud? — Learn about who uses the cloud, its benefits, the underlying technology, commercial and technical deployment models, and recent evolution.

Carnegie’s Cloud Research — Learn about Carnegie’s broader work on the policy implications of cloud computing.

Lexicon — Explore key terms that appear throughout the website.