I suspect that most of us are still struggling to make sense of recent developments in trade policy by the USA, both in terms of the China spat (which does appear, at least in part, to be about trade) and Mexico (which does not). Clearly there are better places to read about this in general than Supl's blog (the Economist is running a particularly good piece this week about the dangers to the US of weaponising their pivotal role in globalisation - https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/06/06/america-is-deploying-a-new-economic-arsenal-to-assert-its-power.) However, I am due to debate the pros and cons of the public cloud with Node4's Andrew Gilbert, Azure's Marketing Director Alex Montgomery and the Gadget Show's Georgie Barrat this week, so the old cogs have been whirring away thinking about this issue specifically for enterprise IT.
On the face of it, there's not much to say: issues of excessive immigration into Texas and China's dirigiste economic policies seem a million miles away from Salesforce.com. However, lurking underneath these Chinese and Mexican standoffs is a political challenge to ideas that have run unquestioned since the end of the Second World War, a challenge that might pop up and bite the enterprise cloud.
At risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, it has been a settled truth for as long as I have worked that it's good to be interconnected. Thus the drawback of not being in full control of everything was vastly outweighed by being a part of something bigger - thus global capital flows and international trade grew far faster than the overall global economy as experts lauded the improvements they brought in the depth of investment capital. Furthermore, the Law of Competitive Advantage allowed many hundreds of millions of souls in the Developing World to be lifted out of poverty as they entered the global economy. For a while, all was well. Then came the Great Recession, a shock widely (but perhaps over-simplistically) attributed to "unfettered capital" which built on the slower-burning but no less potent sense of dispossession and disenfranchisement felt by many in the Developed World who weren't bankers or multinational bosses. Suddenly the argument that people would not commit economic suicide by breaking those connections weakened as it became clear that many in the West viewed such connectivity as a source of their anguish, not prosperity.
On top of that came the end of another settled truth: that it is good to be bound by a common set of international rules. If there is anything common to the politics of Trump, Salvini, Bolsonaro and Farage it is the aggressive rejection of received norms of institutional behaviour and being bound by rules, particularly those agreed by predecessors. To them, politics is about the pursuit and exploitation of political power, activities that trump (as it were) all other considerations. I make no comment either way on this. It is clear that such as approach is wildly popular in some quarters, and pretty successful in the short term: just look at the speed at which Mexico sent a delegation to Washington after being threatened with escalating tariffs in Presidential tweet. As much as the Chinese government are fuming at Trump's naked attempt to blunt their leadership in 5G, there is little they can do for now.
The Cloud has been delivered by the two great truths of the post war world: a belief in connectedness and a willingness to play by a common set of rules. Whilst it may be difficult to anticipate exactly how sand could be thrown into the wheels of the enterprise web, we would be unwise not to discount it, particularly as the constituency most harmed by friction would be West Coast Tech types, not exactly on the current President's Christmas Card List. Indeed, the rejection of connectivity and common rules of behaviour has no doubt been greeted with glee by those authoritarian governments who have long chafed at the transparency of the open web, and who have long desired its breakup into more manageable (and bully-able) fragments.
So what is my point? You might question why I would raise this ticklish issue when my business is about helping businesses migrate to the cloud. However, I've never believed such migration is a silver bullet, and always promoted business process change alongside technical migration to manage the (different) risks that the cloud represents, even as I can demonstrate huge advantages. This is another risk to be mitigated, and it would not be professional for someone in my position not to try to get to grips with it, even as I acknowledge that it is early days.
Notwithstanding this, I think there are sensible measures to put in place. One such episode in the rejection of common rules is Brexit, where UK financial firms once guaranteed a passport across the whole EU from one base will most likely have to sprout new offices and legal entities across the Continent to do the same business. It will likely be expensive and only open to the larger players. Using that as a model, it therefore follows that (sadly) firms should opt for the larger, incumbent enterprise cloud players, who will have the financial and managerial resources to react to a balkanisation of the cloud.