Cloud computing has become a fundamental requirement for most organizations.
With this in mind, cloud computing is massively on the rise in the current day and age. In fact, 81 percent of companies with 1,000 employees or more have a multi-platform strategy. The number is to rise to more than 90 percent by 2024. Between 2018 and 2021, worldwide spending on public cloud services is to grow to 73 percent, from $160B to $277B.
Cloud computing has been around for so many years, and this sudden growth might surprise a lot of the industry players.
Cloud computing became a phenomenon in the early 2000s. However, due to the lack of awareness about the potential of technology, many brands hesitated to adopt it for their products and processes. Bart McDonough, CEO of Agio, believes the recent rapid adoption of cloud is mainly due to the understanding of “ease of use and scalability” of the technology.
As organizations expand their understanding of the enormous benefits of cloud computing, they are now more willing to conduct workload tests on cloud and even migrate entire applications to the cloud.
Timeline of cloud computing growth
Let’s take a look at some major moments in cloud computing’s recent history.
| January 1, 1999: Salesforce makes bold cloud computing move | Salesforce.com came into the limelight by working on the concept of providing users with enterprise-level applications over the internet. |
| Jun 5, 2002: Amazon joins the cloud race | On top of Salesforce’s success, Amazon Web Service (AWS) started offering computational and storage solutions to its users via the internet. |
| Aug 26, 2006: Birth of AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) | Amazon took the competition to a whole next level by introducing Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). EC2 allowed developers and brands to rent a virtual cloud-based machine that they can use for application execution or data storage. This caught the attention of competitors who responded by launching their own cloud platform in hopes of capturing the market share. |
| Jun 5, 2007: Dropbox offers a file storage solution | Dropbox introduced its file hosting service, and with that cloud storage became a commodity in 2007. |
| Oct 3, 2007: Saleforce.com brings Force.com to challenge the rivals | Force allowed the organization to use the cloud for building, storing and running applications for their business operations. |
| Dec 6, 2008: Google heats up the competition | Google entered the cloud industry by launching the Google App, which served as an entry point to cloud computing services. Thanks to Google’s broad user base and widespread usage, a huge number of brands adopted cloud computing as the standard technology for their operations. |
| Feb 2, 2010: Microsoft joins the fray | Microsoft launched Azure as an integrated solution for streamlining web and mobile application development and easy integration within existing business processes. |
| Late 2011: IBM joins the contest | IBM also joins the competition by introducing a suite of enterprise-class cloud computing technologies for building private, public, and hybrid clouds. |
Since cloud computing simplifies the process of monitoring resource consumption, the brands were able to use it for development and services delivery with a much higher level of confidence. Gradually, real-time streaming services started processing data over the cloud. Capitalizing on the opportunity, Microsoft launched Power BI, a business analytics and intelligence tool with comprehensive interactive visualization.
