The atmospheric rise of cloud computing

The atmospheric rise of cloud computing

From the dawn of civilization to 2003human beings generated 5 exabytes of stored information. Now this has been created every two days.

And by 2025, half of all the world’s data will be in the cloud, allowing people to save, control and work with it remotely or in any other environment.

In the infographic above, sponsored by the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, we dive into everything there is to know about the atmospheric rise of cloud computing.

What does the cloud contain?

Many types of data, from text files, images and videos to large archives and application data, are stored in the cloud.

Today, the average employee uses 36 cloud-based services daily, and businesses as a whole store approximately 60% of their data in the cloud.

Several cloud storage services have been created based on this growing demand. As a result, there are four major cloud storage systems according to Spiceworks:

1. Private cloud storage: The data and resources in a private cloud are typically not shared with other organizations or users. This is suitable for large companies.
2. Public cloud storage: Publicly available and is maintained by a third-party provider. Resources and data in a public cloud are shared among multiple users and organizations.
3. Hybrid Cloud Storage: Combine public and private cloud infrastructure. This allows organizations to use the public cloud for non-sensitive data and the private cloud for sensitive data. This is therefore more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses.
4. Community Cloud Storage: Shared among organizations with similar security goals, policies, and requirements. Organizations or a third-party provider can manage the community cloud. It is suitable for financial, healthcare, legal, compliance, etc. systems.

Types of cloud storage infrastructure

Cloud storage systems require physical infrastructure and the main types are:

1. Data warehouse they are storage houses that collect data from various sources and organize it into a single format. They allow for rapid processing and analysis of information. This makes them a good choice for business intelligence (BI) and data-driven work.
2. Lakes of data store raw data in its original format. They handle batch processing efficiently and are ideal for data scientists and engineers working with raw data.
3. Data lakehouse offer the combined services of warehouses and lakes.

Individuals and organizations can increase the flexibility and responsiveness when analyzing data by using the processing power of data warehouses and the storage scale of data lakes, which are getting bigger and more powerful every year.

Current market value and future projections

Despite the the global cloud storage market is just one segment of the global cloud computing market, it is expected to reach beyond 376 billion dollars with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%.

The fastest growing regions for the cloud storage market are the Middle East and Africa. Also, the fastest growing segment is backup and disaster recovery.

The rapid expansion of cloud computing as a whole is expected to catapult the market to staggering heights $947.3 billion by 2026almost double that of 2022.

cloud storage vs. Cloud Computing

Cloud computing and cloud storage they are often used interchangeably but are not the same. Cloud computing provides processing power made available on the cloud to perform computational tasks, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.

However, cloud storage provides data storage capacity available through the cloud, such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and Dropbox.

By 2026, 45% it is expected that all IT spending will be allocated to innovative cloud development and management companies.

Investing in the cloud

Investing in companies like Databricks and those providing modern cloud systems, like Snowflake, will be key to driving progress and innovation in the future.

The Scottish Mortgage gives visibility to these and other pioneers of progress. In the next part of this Pioneers of Progress series, we dive into the synthetic biology market.