The growth of the cloud computing market is expected to reach over $302 billion by 2025. The market is driven by the rapid adoption of cloud computing caused by increasing business benefits from cloud technological advancements. The cloud computing market has also been driven by increased use of third-party hosted services, such as Microsoft's Office 365 and Google Apps. As of 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the largest public cloud provider with 37% share of overall revenue. In 2021, Microsoft Azure became the second largest public cloud provider with 18% share.

Computers entering the cloud are connected to a central hub and the data delivered to that hub is then sent to and loaded on the user's computer when they request it, as opposed to the entire file being downloaded and stored on the user's own computer. This frees up users' computers, allowing them to share and access data at any given time without worrying about downloading it and allowing them to work more efficiently. Learn more information about cloud computing here!

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the provision of computing resources as a service over a network. This leads to customers requiring only those resources they need when they need them. This shifts the responsibility of managing and maintaining computing resources to the cloud provider, who uses these resources to provide services to end users. The cloud allows companies to quickly deploy virtual computers and other large-scale applications with little or no capital expenditure, allowing costs to be shifted away from infrastructure costs and onto subscription fees. By providing on-demand self-service access to hardware, operating systems, and software (as a service), rather than requiring customers to purchase these resources upfront, cloud providers reduce their overall sales and support costs. For example, a company might save 20% by buying server time for a year in the cloud instead of on-site. Additionally, companies can reduce their exposure to risk due to disasters such as floods or power outages by hosting their servers in data centers that are separate from their critical operations.

Simply put, cloud computing is computing based on the internet. 

In the past, people would run applications or programs from software downloaded on a physical computer or server in their building. Cloud computing allows people access to the same kinds of applications through the internet. Cloud computing is based on the premise that the main computing takes place on a remote machine.

The cloud is a wonderful way to run a business, since it provides extreme agility.

Cloud computing offers a wide range of applications that fall under one of these three services: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service. The users have the option to create private, public or hybrid network access, or the option to decide the location of your virtual data center, the possibilities are completely customizable. Along with endless possibilities created from an array of services, cloud computing can adapt to any changes. The firm can choose to accommodate 10,000 web users during a Christmas sale instead of 2,000 daily targets. In another instance, the firm can choose to switch from private to hybrid network or choose to temporarily expand storage capacity, cloud computing can do all that seamlessly and effortlessly to satisfy the firm’s needs.  Now that is agility!