THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
It’s a sunny June day in southeast England. I’m driving along a quiet, rural road that stretches through the Kent countryside. The sun flashes through breaks in the hedgerow, offering glimpses of verdant crop fields and old farmhouses.
Thick hawthorn and brambles make it difficult to see the 10-foot-high razor-wire fence that encloses a large grassy mound. You’d never suspect that 100 feet beneath the ground, a high-tech cloud computing facility is whirring away, guarding the most valuable commodity of our age: