The Cloud Nexus. The Impact of Cloud Adoption on Competitiveness and Great-Power Competition in the 21st Century. The Case of the US, the EU, and th

Cloud computing is a platform service for storing, managing, and processing data on remote rather than local servers. Since data are the basic units of the digital economy, all major powers are devising strategies to migrate their data to the Cloud and fully harness the benefits of the digital revolution. Such migration concerns both the public and the private sector, including government agencies, ministries, and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), as well as all businesses involved in the management of critical infrastructures. The Cloud market, however, is currently concentrated among a handful of (mostly US-based) companies, whose technical capabilities and scalability are often indispensable for third states to develop their Public Cloud strategies. As a result, several polities are striving to strike a balance between economic considerations - the need to have US hyperscalers as part of their Cloud ecosystem - and security ones - protecting the confidentiality of their data from companies which are potentially subject to extra-territorial legislations. Against this background, the project focuses on the polities of the European Union and the United Kingdom, comparing their strategic approaches to cloud computing. In doing so, the project seeks to answer the following research question: how do they seek to balance the strategic need to accelerate its migration to cloud computing with the objective of reducing its reliance on foreign cloud providers?

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.