Earlier this month, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a prediction by David Castro that the US cloud computing industry stands to lose up to $35-billion by 2016, thanks to the National Security Agency (NSA) PRISM project.
However, Forrester’s James Staten thinks the estimate is too low and could be as high as $180-billion – or a 25% hit to overall IT service provider revenues – in that same timeframe.
According to Staten, David Castro’s analysis really limited the impact to the actions of non-US corporations. The high-end figure assumes that US-based cloud computing providers would lose 20% of the potential revenues available from the foreign market.
Staten writes in a blog post: “We believe there are two additional impacts that would further be felt from this revelation: that US customers would also bypass US cloud providers for their international and overseas business – costing these cloud providers up to 20% of this business as well; and that non-US cloud providers will lose as much as 20% of their available overseas and domestic opportunities due to other governments taking similar actions.”