Disruption has taken a lead role in the discussion about the impact of technologies.

The scale of the changes that are happening in different areas is similar to the changes brought to us by the invention of the steam engine and assembly lines, electricity and the internet.

In the 2015 book “No Ordinary Disruption,” McKinsey consultants estimate that change today is happening 10 times faster and at 300 times the scale of the First Industrial Revolution, which they say works out to 3,000 times the impact.

Cloud is one of the backbones of this change, being the bridge that connects all the other techs that converge into it: driverless cars, advanced analytics, connected devices, genomics, geolocation and so on.

Microsoft published a book, “A cloud for Global Good”(luckily you can read the digital version on the MS website, here) to push the discussion into the spotlight. The main concerns with adopting any new technology without proper oversight, they can fall into the grey area of invading privacy and eroding personal freedoms.

Significant changes will happen in areas that traditionally have been slow to adopt technology, like energy production, education or the public sector.

Chapter 2 has the most important information, policy suggestions in specific areas, from cybersecurity to digital literacy, areas that governments have power and interest to regulate.

Chapter 3 goes through different use cases to show the full extent of the impact of cloud technologies in different economic sectors. While some are quite obvious, medium sized companies or industry, others are usually overlooked – NGO’s or public and governmental organizations.

Satya Nadella has a post on this too.

Companies involved in selling cloud solution have all the interest into bringing this discussion into spotlight – for marketing purposes obviously, but also because nobody yet has any answers or what type of impact the full-scale adoption of cloud will have. The more the public is involved into this, the better it will be for shaping the direction and speed that we want to have in integrating these solutions into our daily lives.