When people say your photos are 'in the cloud', it sounds as if they float somewhere in the air. In practice the cloud is very tangible: huge buildings full of computers, spread around the world and owned mainly by a few giant companies. 'Cloud' is simply a name for using someone else's computers over the internet instead of your own.
Before the cloud era, a company that wanted to run a website or system had to buy servers, put them in an air-conditioned room, maintain them and replace them when they aged. If there was a sudden surge, say during a sale, the servers crashed. If load dropped, they sat idle. The cloud changed that: instead of buying computers, you rent computing power as needed and pay only for what you use, a bit like paying for electricity.
The three biggest players are Amazon with AWS, Microsoft with Azure and Google with Google Cloud. They run hundreds of data centers worldwide, and local cloud regions have also been set up in Israel in recent years. Almost every app you know, from Netflix to your bank's app, runs on one of them or a combination. Many Israeli companies are built on the cloud, and some, like Wiz, grew precisely out of the need to secure it.
The advantages are clear: no big upfront investment, fast growth, and maintenance responsibility moves to the provider. But there are drawbacks. When a big cloud provider goes down, thousands of services go down with it. Costs can climb fast if not managed. And there are questions of privacy and sovereignty: where exactly is the data stored, and who can access it?
And AI? It made the cloud more important than ever. Models like ChatGPT run in huge cloud data centers, and most companies using AI do so through cloud services rather than their own machines. That is one reason cloud companies are investing enormous sums in new data centers, and why the question of where to build them has become political.
