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Last week was a good week for big tech, and by extension cloud computing. This helped lead the way to huge gains for the big three — Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. 

As CNBC reported on Friday, the big five, which also includes Facebook and Apple gained an astonishing $181 billion in market cap on Friday alone. Of that, Amazon gained the most with a $61.7 billion gain, followed by Microsoft with $39 billion, and finally Alphabet (the parent company of Google) with a $29.2 billion gain.

That’s $129.9 billion in market cap increase from the three biggest public cloud companies out there is a single day. Now, not all of that increase can be attributed to the cloud, but it certainly played a significant role in the market’s perception of what these companies are doing.

This all suggests that public cloud computing’s moment that has finally arrived. That’s especially true for Infrastructure providers like AWS, Google, and Microsoft and SaaS providers like Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, Box, Zendesk and others.

Listen to the tide slowly turning

For a long time, the cloud business was swimming against a tide of IT prejudice that they alone could protect the company’s assets, and they surely weren’t going to outsource that to a third party company. By now, we know the private data center is the one that’s less secure and the public cloud is where you want to go to protect your data.

If you doubt that look at example after example from Equifax  just the latest in a long line of major breaches — to Anthem, OPM, Sony, JP Morgan-Chase, and Target to name but a few. By now, most IT pros know they aren’t in a position to protect the company from the myriad of threats out there today.

Of course, the value proposition of the cloud involves much more than security. There is an SLA that guarantees uptime. Yes, cloud services go down from time to time, but so do services in-house too. We hear more about the public cloud outages because they are, well, public and not many companies are going on social media to complain that their Exchange server is down again.

The cloud also brings the beauty of elasticity, to use only those resources you need, to scale up or down as needed, while moving the expense from CapEx to OpEx. It brings you agility an in-house data center just isn’t capable of providing. You’ve heard all these arguments before, but it’s worth reiterating because the market finally catching up with the idea.

For a time it was a few edge cases, then the really early adopters, then some experimentation from just about everyone, and now it’s part of the mainstream of any computing strategy. This isn’t to say that everyone’s all in or the market is saturated, but it has reached a tipping point of sorts and, if those numbers on Friday were any indication, it’s going to enrich the companies who had the foresight to offer these services before it was a popular notion to do so. And as more workloads move to the cloud over the next decade, those numbers could get even bigger.

Photo:  Simon Bratt / Shutterstock.


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Ron Miller

Posted by Ron Miller

Ron Miller is a freelance technology reporter and blogger. He is contributing editor at EContent Magazine and enterprise reporter at TechCrunch.

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