Cloudification and the Capture of Business Infrastructure

In this article:

• What Is Cloudification and Why Does It Not Feel Like a Trap
• How Did Cloudification Capture Business Infrastructure Without Resistance
• What Revenue Model Does Cloudification Create for Platforms
• Frequently Asked Questions
• What is cloudification and how does it differ from using cloud software?
• Why did businesses cloudify their infrastructure without realizing the consequence?
• How does cloudification create a captive revenue stream for platforms?
• References

Cloudification is the process by which independent compute, independent storage, and independent software infrastructure migrates onto centralized platforms owned by a small number of corporations. For businesses, it did not happen as a deliberate decision. It happened as a series of individually reasonable tool choices that accumulated into total infrastructure dependency.

Before cloudification, a business's tools ran on software it owned or licensed outright. The data lived on servers it controlled. The workflows existed in formats it could inspect, export, and migrate. Switching tools meant migrating data, not losing it.

After cloudification, the business's tools run on infrastructure owned by the platform. The data lives on servers the platform controls. The workflows exist inside proprietary systems the business can use but cannot inspect. Switching tools means starting over. The migration is not a technical problem. It is a loss event.

No business sat down and decided to hand their infrastructure to a set of cloud platforms. The decisions happened incrementally: one tool replaced a spreadsheet, another replaced a manual process, a third replaced a locally-installed application. Each decision was reasonable in isolation. The aggregate result was the cloudification of the entire operational stack.

The platforms that benefited understood what was happening. The businesses that enabled it mostly did not have a name for it. Cloudification is not a term the industry uses. That absence of naming is part of how the capture happened without resistance.

Cloudification is not neutral infrastructure. It is a business model. Once operational data lives inside a platform's cloud, the platform has acquired a captive revenue stream. The monthly subscription is the visible rent. The locked data is the mechanism that ensures the rent keeps getting paid regardless of product quality.

The platform does not need to keep improving. It needs to keep the data inaccessible enough that leaving costs more than staying.

Cloudification is the structural process by which previously independent compute, storage, and software infrastructure migrates onto centralized platforms owned by a small number of corporations. Using cloud software is a transaction. Cloudification is the aggregate outcome of many such transactions that results in total infrastructure dependency.

Each individual decision to move a tool to the cloud was locally rational: the cloud version was more convenient, better maintained, and cheaper to set up. The consequence, total dependency on infrastructure controlled by others, emerged from the aggregate of individually reasonable decisions. how digital enclosure works through the same mechanism of individually rational decisions.

Once operational data lives inside a platform's cloud, the platform has acquired leverage that converts the subscription from a market transaction into a tribute payment. The data cannot leave without loss. The platform can raise prices without competitive consequence.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023.

Electronic Frontier Foundation. eff.org.