At the end of July, Microsoft and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, presented their latest and relatively disappointing economic results blaming it on the macroeconomic distress. What may have gone unnoticed is that both companies referred to their clouds as the main engines of growth. The cloud was also responsible for Amazon’s better-than-expected quarterly results.
The cloud refers to computing services, including software, hardware, and platforms offered as services through the Internet instead of running locally on individual computers. By 2025, 45% of the world’s data storage will be on the cloud. We are constantly storing information and accessing online applications through the cloud.
Moving operations to the cloud is also crucial for companies. Yet, this mass transfer of information technology from inside organizations to the cloud is a very recent phenomenon. In 2012, firms spent just USD 6.5b on cloud infrastructure services; by 2021, investments had jumped to USD 178b (representing an increase of 2,638%). While the Cloud is used by all sorts of companies and public sector organizations, its ownership is overwhelmingly dominated by just three firms. Together, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google
— source ineteconomics.org | Cecilia Rikap | Oct 12, 2022