It seems Edward Snowden’s whistle blowing on NSA has started a whole new trend of employees leaking confidential information about their organizations. Very recently, a former employee of IBM has divulged huge amount of documentation about the company’s lack of expertise in cloud computing. Ironically, this area of computing is being hailed as the future of computer industry.
This leak which exposes IBM’s vulnerability in cloud computing will have very adverse effects for the company. It will have an impact on the company’s shares in the stock market and will significantly damage public trust. IBM is already competing to maintain its presence in the cloud computing market, a field which is heavily dominated by software behemoths like Microsoft and Apple. Furthermore, IBM’s competition with lesser magnitude players like Oracle and Amazon is also likely to be compromised.
The most shocking aspect of the entire fiasco is that IBM is still unaware of how the secret information was divulged. Nevertheless, the exposition of secret data is sure to cause a fair degree of uneasiness among IBM shareholders. This might result in reduction of stock prices. The mind-boggling thing is, how an employee can transfer and expose crucial files of a company which is well known for its technical suaveness. This major breach in security protocol is clearly reflective of “covert warfare” that is rampant in corporate America nowadays. It seems an easy job (and getting easier) to divulge the secrets and vex multibillion dollar corporations by utilizing formulas and strategies that are very convenient for the hackers.
The former employee at IBM declared that the company didn’t have enough clout over cloud computing as it would project to Wall Street and investors. The whistle blower also revealed cloud computing revenue of the company to be around the $2.26 billion mark. This figure is in total negation of IBM’s targeted $7 billion for cloud revenue in 2015. This will create further concern among stakeholders that IBM is not on the track with its projections.
Charles Babock, Editor in chief of Large information week, says that because of Snowden debacle US based cloud suppliers like IBM may have to incur losses of up to $45 billion. This is due to order pull backs which will cause significant business loss, as it is revealed that NSA monitors emails and other stored data on US cloud vendors archive. The PRISM program could very well spell doom for cloud computing market of America.
Now the question everybody wants to ask is what does an employee gain by exposing sensitive information about their company? Shouldn’t it be categorized as lack of loyalty to the place from where you earn your livelihood? Employees who are blowing the whistle and exposing crucial information against the interest of their former employers, are they disillusioned? In Snowden’s case, it was all about him being very disapproving of how his country was harvesting information even against close allies like the United Kingdom.
