Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019)¹ book titled ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ has highlighted the relentless drive towards the creation of predictive information products for sale on data markets. By their nature, these products and services can only reasonably exist within cloud infrastructures due to their global nature and reliance on scalable distributed compute and storage processes. Therefore, the explosive rise in surveillance capitalism will likely continue to drive proportional increases in cloud demand.

New and established digital businesses are encouraged by their investors to leverage their data to service digital prediction markets, thus driving cloud demand further (Shimp, 2017²). Additionally, highly regulated firms such as banks and major financial firms are facing competition from entrepreneurial incursions into their markets and are under increasing pressure to embrace cloud services (Gozman & Willcocks, 2019³).

There is a drive within the software industry to move to data driven organizational models with central ‘data lakes’ handling storage of curated data which is consumed by siloed software services teams. Snapfix has already gone down the data lake route with our adoption of Google’s Big Query service for handling of our user analytics infrastructure. However, in the most recent technical announcements, there is an emerging push towards a ‘data mesh’ approach which could provide insights into the Mirroring Hypothesis (Al-Ruithe, Benkhelifa, & Hameed, 2018⁴; Dehghani, 2019⁵). I’ve considered this approach and it may be a suitable route for Snapfix to follow when we delve further into our inevitable move towards micro-services. This points to the increasing influence of cloud computing and the importance of extending existing organizational and Information Systems based theories and frameworks, such as the Mirroring Hypothesis, in the direction of cloud computing.

Next: Data Collection