Examining The Economic Contributions Of The Cloud To The United States Economy

Executive Summary

Overview

Examining The Economic Contributions Of The Cloud To The United States Economy estimates the size of the U.S. cloud economy for 2017. According to the estimates:

• The cloud added approximately $214 billion in value-added to U.S. GDP in 2017.
• The cloud added approximately 2.15 million jobs in 2017.
• In approximately 15 years since 2002, the cloud economy has nearly tripled in size.

Motivation

The benefits of cloud technology to firms are clear (or at least minimally contested) despite the technology being a relatively new area of study. However, there is little documentation on the larger macroeconomic effects of cloud technology. This report seeks to measure those macroeconomic impacts and provide critical context to policymakers.

Method

The paper uses a NAICS-based approach to estimate the size of the U.S. cloud economy. Its findings fall in line with other estimates on the cloud’s economic and business contributions.

The paper makes a key contribution to moving cloud-measurement literature forward by providing a detailed methodology and robust estimates on the technology’s GDP, earnings, and employment contributions. The paper uses data for 2002, 2007, and 2012 and makes additional estimates for 2017 based on those data.

Conclusion

More work remains in measuring the economic benefits of cloud technology, but it is clear that cloud computing is already a major force in the economy. There is potential for growth, but policymakers and other stakeholders should recognize its already significant contributions.

Introduction

At the start of the decade, academia offered a range of speculation on the future state and role of computing. Researchers understood major change was underway, but were unsure of how and when that shift would materialize, turning to theory and modeling as means to understanding the assortment of potential futures. The process driving the discussion was the development of the opportunity to change from in-house physical information technology (IT) infrastructure and equipment (i.e. fixed, local data storage and computing), and toward remote computing services (i.e. cloud computing technology), thus providing increased flexibility and options for organizations. (Harms and Yamartino, 2010)

Approximately a decade into the cloud computing era, we are only now beginning to understand just how large and quickly the cloud has grown as a commercial enterprise. Recent research documents clear benefits from cloud technology for businesses, reducing operational costs and increasing flexibility in strategic decision-making. This has, in turn, bolstered the longevity and resilience of firms (Etro, 2011; Wang and McElheran, 2017). However, its footprint remains unmeasured.

In the current paper, the author offers perhaps the first estimate on the aggregate contribution of the cloud economy for the United States. Adapting a methodology utilized by Siwek (2015) for an estimation on the size of the U.S. internet sector, the author estimates that cloud computing in 2012 contributed approximately $165 billion (1.04 percent) in value-added to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). Cloud computing also supported approximately 1.7 million jobs in the U.S., with 80 percent of that employment residing outside of the cloud industry in indirect positions. The cloud economy produced $281 billion in gross output and about the same amount in direct-effect earnings1 that year. The author estimates these figures using official data from industry input-output tables from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Based on growth rates from previous years through 2012, the author estimates the cloud economy contributed approximately $214 billion (1.1 percent) to U.S. GDP and 2.15 million jobs in 2017. In the approximate 15 years since 2002, the cloud economy has nearly tripled in size.

These figures provide the first systematic examination of the cloud’s economic footprint in the U.S. through economic data. While measurement issues remain, which suggest the GDP estimates of this paper are likely low and which the author discusses later,2 the figures presented here align and reinforce the estimates of others. For example, Mandel and Swanson (2017) and Mandel (2018) found that cloud technology would likely boost U.S. GDP by approximately $2 trillion over the next 10 years. More work remains in refining how the cloud is captured in national input-output accounts, particularly related to how investment in cloud technology is treated and on potential adverse effects that may arise to stakeholders of legacy systems. However, the current paper still offers a vital and robust look at just how big of a cloud there is ‘hanging’ over us.

Section 2 reviews cloud technology, providing a brief overview for non-experts. Section 3 details the shift in the U.S. economy to cloud technology, beginning in the 1990s through today, and the limited literature on the economic benefits of cloud technology. Section 4 presents the author’s methodology and results. Section 5 discusses and Section 6 concludes.

Understanding Cloud Technology

One of the most important aspects of the internet as a technology has been its merging of previously disparate markets for data, phone/voice, and media. The internet created a common architecture for digital information and communication and, once employed through broadband systems, it facilitated a new type of system built on remote access, cheap storage, and inexpensive, but increasingly powerful processors. This is the cloud. (Cowhey and Kleeman, 2011)

Mell and Grance (2011) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology define cloud computing as:

“…a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.”3

More concisely, Etro (2009) defined cloud computing as a “new general-purpose Internet-based technology through which information is stored in servers and provided as a service and on-demand to clients.” Cowhey and Kleeman (2011) added that cloud computing is a “scalable on-demand provision of remote computing and data storage.”

More broadly, server hardware, networking equipment, storage systems, and specialized software comprise cloud infrastructure (SDX Central, n.d.; Bayrak, Conley, and Wilkie, 2011). Companies then build remotely-accessible applications on top of that infrastructure through networking services (SDX Central, n.d.). Beyond a new system arrangement of information-communication technologies, cloud computing is also distinguished by how it has forced new capabilities and requirements into software options as a replacement to older software products (Alarcon and Pavlou, 2017).

This shift to cloud, which arose and spread quickly, has pushed information-communication technologies (ICT) into a fourth major epoch of development. Following mainframe development, personal computer development, and the internet, cloud computing technology is – along with other internet-based technologies – fundamentally transforming how ICT systems operate and how users and firms utilize ICT systems for personal and commercial endeavors. Its impacts can be seen in everything from how users listen to music to business expectations for software and applications to debates on more intricate statistical mismeasurement issues around ICT prices in government datasets. Indeed, many see the significant drop in computing prices spurred by cloud technology as an important component in reaching the lofty goal of universal access to information and computing tools. (Talukder and Zimmerman, 2010; Bayrak, Conley, and Wilkie, 2011; Byrne and Corrado, 2017)

Future goals aside, cloud computing is already allowing many firms and individuals from the costly physical world of ICT. They have more options regarding their own ICT infrastructures and can now scale production and operations dynamically as demand for their services or products change. That utility advantage, as documented by Bloom and Pierri (2018), is reflected in the rapid adoption of cloud computing across the United States among businesses. While still low overall, cloud computing adoption increased from less than 0.5 percent of firms in 2010 to approximately 7 percent in 2016 – an annualized increase of about 50 percent.

The shift away from investment and usage of older systems has likely dampened activity in those non-cloud businesses,4 but the cloud has simultaneously empowered firms to refocus on core functions where they have primary competitive advantages in markets. Rather than dealing with data centers, hosting, and other proprietary services, companies and individuals can simply pay as needed, creating greater business efficiency, reducing costs, reducing environmental footprint, and increasing reliability – claims documented in academic literature and seen anecdotally in individual company decisions.5 (Etro, 2010; Talukder and Zimmerman, 2010; Bayrak, Conley, and Wilkie, 2011; Kepes, 2011; Jin and McElheran, 2017)

Cloud In The Literature

Firm Benefits

The great promise of the cloud has been its potential to lengthen and bolster ICT-driven economic growth in both developed and developing countries (Iansiti and Richards, 2012; Serha, 2015). Researchers have already clearly documented the important role of ICT in U.S. productivity gains through the 1990s into the 2000s as well as the shift away from hardware to software and digital technologies during that period (Jorgenson, 2006). Furthermore, researchers have documented a clear and increasing linkage between U.S. productivity and digital technology components like data and processing power, which enable cloud systems (Hooton and Kaing, 2018).

Within these trends, cloud computing has established a pivotal role for both modern ICT systems and for ICT’s economic contributions (Riley, 2017). The speculation, and particularly the cynicism of skeptics on the potential of cloud technology at the start of the decade discussed in the introduction, has largely dissolved and there is now widespread recognition of the technology’s current and future importance in society (McCullagh, 2011; Riley, 2017). Experts now agree the cloud has largely been a positive transformative force in technology, business, and society. This does not negate the corresponding recognition of market disruption that has hit older firms and their supported jobs; rather, it reflects a broad acceptance of previously speculated efficiency gains and their benefits.

Kepes (2011) documented four primary aspects/advantages of cloud technology from a business perspective that more formally define these utility gains: 1) reducing the opportunity cost to running technology; 2) facilitating a shift from capital expenditure to operating expenditure; 3) lowering technology ownership costs; and 4) allowing businesses to refocus on core activities and increase the value of their services to clients.6

These characteristics have translated into clear benefits for businesses and government. Jin and McElheran (2017) tracked a large sample of firms from 2006-2014 and found that cloud technology drove higher business survival and stronger growth among young firms. They also found that young firms, conditional on survival, were more productive because of cloud than older firms with traditional IT capital expenditures. Put more plainly, startups that have grown using cloud are more productive than comparable firms that still use traditional local data storage and computing.7 Alford and Morton (2009) have confirmed the U.S. government’s expectations of significant cost savings by shifting ICT systems to the cloud, finding benefit-cost-ratios of between 5.7 to 15.4 based on different scenarios. Their analysis suggests that ICT cost savings may be as much as two-thirds over a 13-year investment life cycle. Deloitte (2018) found an average return for businesses of approximately $2.5 for every $1 invested in the use of public cloud services from a variety of providers. That is an average return of 250 percent with the upper range reaching nearly $10 return per dollar spent. And Etro (2011) found that the payment-on-demand structure of many cloud services has allowed firms to shift some fixed costs into marginal production costs, thereby incentivizing new business creation and, thus, job creation.

Macroeconomic Studies

The benefits of cloud technology to firms are clear (or at least minimally contested) despite the technology being a relatively new area of study. However, there is little documentation on the larger macroeconomic effects of the cloud.

The research that exists focuses primarily on Europe or specific companies. McWilliams (2012) studied the cumulative economic benefits of the cloud for five European economies – France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK – from 2010-2015. The author found that the cloud contributed a combined EUR 763 billion in value-added to the five economies’ GDP and nearly 2.4 million jobs over that period. These benefits came primarily from existing business growth, new business creation, cost savings, and indirect effects. Deloitte (2017), under commission from The European Commission, found that broader cloud technology adoption across the European Union could add an additional EUR 499 billion to the region’s GDP over the next five years with related increases in employment and business creation.

The authors also estimated that cloud technology contributed approximately EUR 27.9 billion or 0.2 percent of the EU’s GDP in 2013.8 In a separate study, Deloitte (2018) also found similar scale impacts from (only) Google’s cloud services on productivity across 14 countries. These ranged from $300 million to $1.2 billion for large countries and $100 million to $600 million for medium countries.

The estimates cited above are in the same order of magnitude as those of Swanson and Mandel (2017) and Mandel (2018), who estimate that the cloud will boost U.S. GDP by approximately $2 trillion over the next 10 years.

Furthermore, there is additional evidence of non-pecuniary benefits (both macro and micro), such as reduced energy consumption (Hardy, 2018).

Measuring The Cloud Economy

The optimism of the forecasts above are based on the lessons learned from the limited research on the cloud and realization of potential in cloud technology. Experts appear confident in the future direction of the cloud economy, but have only a limited appreciation of cloud’s historic or current economic ‘footprint.’ The current research clearly demonstrates that the potential of cloud technology has already largely been realized. Even if the cloud computing industry still has room for growth, it is already a major economic contributor. The author argues, however, that without a firmer grasp on the cloud’s current footprint, future expectations may miss the mark.

The current paper examines the role of the cloud in the U.S. economy from the period of 2002 to 2017. The author uses five-year economic census data estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau for the years 2002, 2007, and 2012 to develop estimates for the cloud in each of those years and then develops its own estimate for the size of the cloud economy in 2017. The author utilizes product line statistics for different industries within the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) to identify specific receipts associated with the cloud. First, the author identifies specific industry codes (four to six digits) potentially related to cloud technology based on input from a set of cloud experts and by cross-referencing Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) and NAICS codes for publicly-traded cloud companies. The author identified an initial set of publicly-traded cloud companies by referencing the annual state of the cloud report by RightScale (Weins, 2018). The author reviewed the companies mentioned in the report and supplemented it with a general search using search engines and news articles. The author then reviewed a compiled list of companies with Internet Association’s cloud policy director and other outside experts to develop a list of publicly-trade cloud companies. Then the author identified the SIC codes using the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission-reported industry codes for each company. 9

Next, the author downloaded and inspected product line data for each flagged industry to identify specific gross receipt lines related to cloud activity (versus something else), again, using input from cloud technology experts. Finally, the author applied RIMS II industry multipliers from the U.S. Bureau of Economic analysis to the flagged product lines, those related to the cloud, to develop estimates for: Output, Earnings, Employment, Value-added, Direct-effect earnings, and Direct-effect employment. The author used the average multiplier across all 50 states and the District of Columbia for each of the metrics above. Whenever an exact match between a NAICS code and multiplier code was not possible, the author used the multiplier for the next closest industry code aggregation. For example, if a six-digit NAICS code did not have a multiplier, the author would have used the multiplier for the five-digit if possible or, if not five-digit, the five-digit multiplier and so forth.

This methodology does not mean that all output from these 15 firms can be attributed exclusively to cloud. Rather, the author uses the list of companies only as an initial starting point to identify potential cloud industry codes, then confirmed those and other codes with input from industry experts and used only the relevant portion from each of those industry codes. For example, this means that the paper counts only the relevant portion of Amazon’s $178 billion in 2017 revenue and 563,000 employees. The author also notes that it is impossible to distinguish the exact contributions of any specific company to the cloud economy’s U.S. output. The author utilizes industry codes rather than company reports and financial records, which ensures the paper captures other relevant companies not on its initial reference list while also anonymizing the specific contributions of the companies on its starting reference list.10

Table 1 presents a list of the NAICS codes identified by the author as related to cloud, the multiplier used for each code, and the percent of product lines flagged as relevant within that industry code. Appendix A provides full product line tables for every NAICS code with flagged product lines. Table 2 presents the paper’s estimates for the U.S. cloud economy’s contributions to Output, Earnings, Employment, Value-added, Direct-effect earnings, and Direct-effect employment in 2012.

Discussion

According to the paper’s analysis, cloud technology contributed approximately $165 billion in value-added to U.S. GDP and approximately 1.7 million jobs, both part-time and full-time, in 2012. For that year, these equate to approximately 1.04 percent and 1.3 percent of the respective national totals. The cloud contributed $281 billion in final-demand gross output and $101.3 billion in final-demand earnings. The cloud also contributed $281 billion in direct-effect earnings and 333,700 direct-effect jobs.

Applying the same exercise to the years 2002 and 2007, the cloud economy added approximately $78.1 billion and $105.4 billion of value-added to US GDP respectively. The growth trends for the cloud from 2002 to 2017 imply that the cloud contributed approximately $214 billion in value-added and 2.15 million jobs to the U.S. economy in 2017. Figure 1 shows this estimated growth over time.

Figure 1: Estimated Cloud Growth 2002-2017

The figures above rely on a subjective interpretation of which product lines and industries comprise cloud computing in the US economy; however, the use of an expert-based approach is standard among researchers examining high-technology industries and activity. Further refinement and input on the suitability of the flagged product lines and industries would be valuable as future extensions on this research. Additionally, the author recommends that his 2017 estimates be updated upon release of the 2017 economic census data to verify and improve them.

The aggregate output and value-added figures in the paper are not particularly surprising. Numerous financial and technology/cloud industry analysts have estimated annual revenues in the $100-$200 billion range (see McCullagh, 2011 for one such example), which would again put these estimates in the same ‘ballpark’ as these others. Indeed, the most recent estimates found by the author, which were conducted by the Synergy Research Group (2018), place total revenue for the cloud economy at approximately $180 billion for 2017. Given their focus on only six key segments of the cloud market, rather than the more detailed product line by product line approach of the current paper, the slightly smaller, but rather close estimate provides encouragement and reinforcement of the author’s findings as well as that of Synergy Research Group.

Of course, the findings here do not erase broader issues around the potential mismeasurement of the cloud (and mobile) platforms in productivity figures. As discussed by Byrne and Corrado (2017) and Byrne, Corrado, and Sichel (2018), U.S. productivity growth has been slow since 2004 and the decline of U.S. labor productivity growth since then is likely due, in some part, to the shift to cloud technology specifically because of how the cloud is handled from an accounting perspective. The consensus is largely an accounting issue rather than a real reduction in productivity. As this shift has occurred, investment in traditional ICT equipment and software has fallen and, thus, the boost in productivity (based on accounting methods) gained from ICT equipment and software in the 1990s through early 2000s has also declined.11 The author argues that this trend is misleading and that the current treatment of cloud and other digital application expenditures in accounting should be updated to include cloud services as investment as opposed to purely operating expense. This would potentially correct any mismeasurement that may be occurring and raise total estimates on cloud’s contribution to the economy.

Finally, the author also recognizes there are other aspects to the cloud economy’s impacts. In particular, its large disruption of legacy software systems and the lag in transition for many organizations are major issues (Mircea, Ghilic-Micu, and Stoica, 2011; Alarcon and Pavlou, 2017). The disruption has two aspects. First, by incentivizing companies to leave their old data centers, server systems, and other capital equipment for cloud-based services and, second, by causing providers of those older systems to lose business. This disruption has undoubtedly had negative impacts on some firms and organizations as they have transitioned, forcing important questions to individuals and organizations about the benefits and costs of adopting new cloud technologies while increasing competition overall (Tak, Urgaonkar, and Sivasubramaniam, 2011; Alarcon and Pavlou, 2017). But the lag time also speaks to the cloud market still not being fully mature and future growth potential. Thus, the author expects continued growth and disruption well into the coming years as cloud technology continues to become adopted even more widely, but also further distribution of its benefits.

Better understanding of how the impacts of cloud materialize for old and new businesses deserves additional research, particularly regarding the net impacts of cloud. If we consider the cloud to offer efficiency benefits (which are documented in the literature), then the author speculates that robust quantitative analysis would show overall positive benefits for businesses and industries despite disruption. Unfortunately, a full examination of this issue is beyond the scope of the current report, but a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation does suggest that cloud systems may provide net gains in terms of employment and GDP contributions compared to older systems, though more investigation is certainly needed. This is clear when comparing the weighted average multipliers for employment and GDP for all of the cloud-relevant industries identified in the current paper with those of the individual industries.12 The weighted average multipliers for cloud are 14.0603 for employment and 1.4164 for Value-Added (i.e. GDP). The aggregate (weighted average) multiplier for employment is higher than all of the individual industry multipliers (e.g. the employment multiplier of just 541413) except two industries, codes 45411 and 541519. The aggregate (weighted average) multiplier for GDP is higher than every one of the individual industry multipliers. This is hardly conclusive evidence, but it provides a small step forward over anecdotal evidence only.

Conclusion

How big is the cloud? It is a question that has been approached from an engineering standpoint and in a limited amount of research from an economics perspective. Somewhat surprisingly, however, it has not previously been directly addressed for the U.S. economy.

The current paper presents a NAICS-based approach to estimate the size of the U.S. cloud economy. Its findings fall in line with other tangential estimates on the cloud’s economic and business contributions, but move the literature forward by providing a detailed methodology and robust estimates on the technology’s GDP, earnings, and employment contributions. The numbers are impressive, at approximately $214 billion in value-added and 2.15 million jobs in 2017.

The author builds on an accepted methodology for the measurement of nascent industries and sub-industries to provide a foundation for future research on the economic contributions of the cloud. The details of that methodology, which are clearly presented in the paper, can guide future estimates, but should also be refined as our understanding of cloud technology continues to grow.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the report is that cloud computing has already become a force in the economy. Yes, there remains much potential for growth, but policymakers and other stakeholders should recognize its already significant contributions. Cloud computing is not a technology of the future; it is a very real and present boon to internet and economic systems today. Its expected future growth will only bolster its importance.

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Appendix A – Product Line Receipt Detail