The Cloud Nexus. The Impact of Cloud Adoption on Competitiveness and Great-Power Competition in the 21st Century. The Case of the US, the EU, and th

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Cloud computing is a platform service for storing, managing, and processing data on remote rather than local servers. Since data are the basic units of the digital economy, all major powers are devising strategies to migrate their data to the Cloud and fully harness the benefits of the digital revolution. Such migration concerns both the public and the private sector, including government agencies, ministries, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as well as all businesses involved in the management of critical infrastructures. The Cloud market, however, is currently concentrated among a handful of (mostly US-based) companies, whose technical capabilities and scalability are often indispensable for third states to develop their Public Cloud strategies. As a result, several polities are striving to strike a balance between economic considerations - the need to have US hyperscalers as part of their Cloud ecosystem - and security ones - protecting the confidentiality of their data from companies which are potentially subject to extra-territorial legislations. Against this background, the project focuses on the polities of the European Union and the United Kingdom, comparing their strategic approaches to cloud computing. In doing so, the project seeks to answer the following research question: how do they seek to balance the strategic need to accelerate its migration to cloud computing with the objective of reducing its reliance on foreign cloud providers?