Hello and welcome to the Spectators podcast. I'm Kate Andrews.

COVID-19 has disrupted business in normal operations as we know them and led to a surge in digitization.

From high street shops to GP services, so much of our in-person interaction has moved online.

In some sense, the pandemic has simply accelerated trends, but for many, small businesses in particular,

adaption isn't without its challenges.

From employers to consumers, workers to patients, how data is stored, shared,

and transferred is becoming an increasingly personal and important experience. So what exactly is cloud

computing? How does it affect us? And can it be used and expanded to help us recover from an

extremely painful year? Joining me today to answer these questions is Matt Warman,

Minister for Digital Infrastructure, and Rachel Wolfe,

founding partner of Public First,

an author of a quantitative study sponsored by Amazon Web Services

that looks at the importance of cloud computing for UK business.

This podcast is kindly sponsored by AWS.

Rachel, let's start with you. I think listeners will know about the cloud through their personal

or work life, maybe that's Dropbox or work servers or Apple Cloud where they store their

photos. But in reality, cloud provisions cover a lot more, from data storage, databases,

networking, and even software.

Can you explain why this technology matters and why our listeners should care about it?

So I'm very impressed if all your listeners know what the cloud is, because I find it still almost impossible to explain.

I think there's this unseen piece of foundational infrastructure.

We're used to thinking of things like trains as infrastructure,

...