We’ve been hearing for years now that the future of computing is all about the cloud. Cloud computing, we’re told, will have numerous advantages for enterprises large and small:

In enterprise computing, somewhere between the era of punched-card computers and the rise of the personal computer, there was the heyday of the mainframe and the “dumb terminal”—a keyboard and a monochrome monitor with no graphics capability, no mouse, no speakers, no webcam, no USB anything. One mainframe computer could support a large number of simultaneous users who logged in via these dumb terminals; they neither knew nor cared where the actual computer was located.

Cloud computing has been a trendy topic for years. Today the industry is riddled with competition, and consumers have multiple options to choose from. Prices have decreased, while quality has improved as a result of competition in the market. Companies like AWS, Google Cloud and Azure have been advancing their technologies dramatically in an attempt to get ahead. Here’s where cloud computing stands in 2018.