It has become the foundation platform for digital giants such as Alibaba, Amazon, Google, Netflix and Tencent, and represents now over a quarter of the revenues of all IT and business services – and will reach 50% by the mid-2020s. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the fastest enterprise IT vendor to reach a $10 billion run-rate. Cloud has had transformative effects across many sectors such as media, retail and financial services. 

But perhaps of most significance to our readers is the impact it is having on the IT industry itself where customers, large and small, are adopting commodity cloud services in preference to restrictive and costly outsourcing and on-premise arrangements