While walking around with your head in the clouds may be detrimental to your dreams of succeeding in business, many of today’s industries have not only their heads, but other significant parts of their operation in the clouds. More and more, cloud computing is gaining widespread acceptance and use across a wide spectrum of industries and markets. What’s this all about?

“…and if you squint very hard, the upper left one looks like Amazon.com.”

Why The Cloud?

At this point, most everyone knows what the cloud is, but here’s a quick refresher. It’s a means for businesses and consumers to access resources such as data storage or applications from remote servers via the Internet, as opposed to using similar resources in-house. For instance, DropBox is cloud storage. Google and Amazon also have cloud drives. Think of it as outsourcing your computer operations.

Once upon a time, businesses and consumers had to purchase software applications and implement them on-site. Furthermore, they had to invest in hardware to accommodate their data storage needs. But when the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS) began to take hold, people realized that sending these functions off-site involved less time and resources, which consequently meant lower costs. Is it any wonder why cloud-related corporate spending is expected to triple by 2017?

Not only is the cloud a cheaper (and thus more attractive) option for today’s businesses, it’s also faster and easier to set up, virtually maintenance-free (the cloud host handles things like upgrades), and is easily scalable to accommodate the needs of each unique customer.

Another benefit of the cloud is that it enables small to medium businesses to have the same kind of computing power and resources that the big corporations enjoy, thereby better equipping the smaller businesses to be competitive in today’s markets. Cloud computing today has changed. Resources once only found by the major movers and shakers can now be access by any enterprise regardless of size.

Let’s Hear It For The VoIP

In addition to data storage and SaaS, the cloud is also making telecommunications more efficient and cost-effective. Cloud-based phone systems, also known as hosted VoIP systems, bring the low startup costs, scalability, and ease of use that are characteristic of the cloud, which makes the system a far more attractive alternative to the traditional phone systems.

Explosive Growth

IHS Technology released a report earlier this year that projects cloud spending will exceed $235 billion by 2017, triple the amount spent in 2011. This year alone, worldwide business spending for cloud-related services and infrastructure will reach about $174.2 billion, which is a 20% increase from last year.

Meanwhile, Cloudability, which monitors how much money customers spend on cloud-related services, released figures indicating that people are spending over three times as much per hour now for cloud computing than they did in late 2012.

A report by Gartner shows that highest cloud technology growth rates are found in the Asia-Pacific region, Eastern Europe, Latin America, North Africa, and the Middle East. North America, Western Europe and Japan are also growing but not as rapidly, since the latter have already had cloud implementation for several years now. Let’s just say that the former bloc is playing catch up, which in turn makes for some pretty spectacular growth figures.

Increasing Cloud, But A Sunny Outlook

The adoption rate of cloud-based services shows no sign of slowing down, in fact quite the opposite. With fast, reliable, and inexpensive resources available through cloud computing, the future looks truly bright for everyone from the biggest corporations to the individual consumer.