There’s a lot more to the Cloud than storage these days — and competition is getting crowded
Cloud storage was once primarily thought of as a place to keep data online securely or to host a website, but tech giants increasingly want their customers to think about what can be done with the data once it’s put there — and, of course, to pay for services that manipulate it.
Large corporations have traditionally used servers to store big quantities of data that can then be analyzed for trends or to predict results. Now the cloud is also hosting analytic programs that smaller organizations can use to get much-needed results.
For example, a car insurance company could do instant on-site assessments: agents upload photos of an accident’s damage through an app to the cloud where machine learning and artificial intelligence analyze them and quickly send back a quote. That eliminates the need to return to the office where it could take hours or days to do an assessment.
