Federico Etro on The Impact of Cloud Computing on the EU Economy

About the Speaker:




Professor Federico Etro is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Milan, Bicocca, President of the first International academic Think-tank on Innovation and Competition (INTERTIC) and is also the current Director of an economic and industrial consulting company, ECG. He has also acted as a consultant for the Italian Ministry of Economy and for major international companies on antitrust issues.

He is the author of a seminal article on cloud computing in 2009 entitled: 'The Economic Impact of Cloud Computing on Business Creation, Employment and Output in Europe', and has written several recent textbooks on law and competition. He also writes for the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, and the Rand Journal of Economics and is the current the editor of the Review of Business and Economics Journal at the Catholic University of Louvain.

About the Event:

In order to recover from the current financial crisis and achieve private sector-driven sustainable growth over the medium to long term, Ireland must respond quickly by tapping into the potential of new digital industries and ensuring first mover advantage in innovative technologies such as cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a pay-as-you-go Internet-based technology through which information is stored in servers and then provided as an on-demand service to clients. It is quickly being recognised as a technology that can help foster economic growth and enhance competition offering opportunities to SMEs or internet start-ups wishing to upscale or downsize. Cloud computing has the capacity to reduce the cost structures of firms allowing them, for example, to outsource their data for storage in data centres and adopt a pay as you go service from the 'cloud on demand', thus avoiding the large up-front costs of hardware and software. Furthermore, by centralising hardware and software infrastructures in one cloud, it has the capacity to contribute to a greener economy and to foster environmental sustainability.

In his 2009 paper, 'The Economic Impact of Cloud Computing on Business Creation, Employment and Output in Europe', Professor Etro outlined the advantages for small and agile European countries in the early adoption of cloud computing. In his presentation to IIEA members, Professor Etro will outline these advantages and will examine how Ireland, as a small country with an already large corporate Internet presence and ambitions to be a leading digital hub, is in a unique position to obtain large economic gains by an early adoption of cloud-friendly policies.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Federico
• Etro
• Impact
• of
• Cloud
• Computing
• EU
• Economy
• Economics
• INTERTIC
• Innovation
• Competition
• ECG
• Business
• Creation