Understanding Snowden's impact on IT... in 2 minutes

When Edward Snowden leaked 200,000 classified documents that uncovered the NSA's digital surveillance programs, it rocked the IT world. We break down the three biggest impacts.

When we look back at 2013 a decade from now, the one technology story that's likely to have the biggest long-term impact is the Edward Snowden revelations. 

While there were major password breaches at Adobe, Evernote, and Twitter as well as the Healthcare.gov debacle, nothing rocked the IT world more than the 200,000 classified documents that Snowden leaked to the press, uncovering the NSA's startling digital surveillance programs that reach more broadly across the Internet than even many of the most extreme conspiracy theorists would have feared.

While the U.S. government defends the program as court-supervised and a powerful tool that has thwarted terrorist attacks and protected citizens, there's no doubt that the Snowden revelations have had a chilling effect on the technology world. 

Here are the three biggest impacts:

Organizations are re-thinking how to effectively encrypt their most sensitive dataInternational organizations are looking at ways to do less business with U.S. companies, since the NSA has direct backdoors into many of them.The brakes are being put on cloud computing by some organizations, as they consider whether they want their data so easily accessible to surveillance agencies.

As one IT architect said, "The USA's global surveillance efforts have done more to damage cloud deployments than any amount of FUD."

To dig deeper on this topic, see the links below. Then, join the discussion in the comments.

Tech Pro Research is a joint venture between ZDNet and TechRepublic that includes exclusive in-depth features, original research, ebooks, and IT policy templates, all aimed at helping technology decision makers.