Backing Up Our Future: Internet and Cloud Storage Statistics for 2020

Featured article by Emma Bishop, Independent Technology Author

To look at today from the lens of even 15 years ago is an extraordinary thing. Computers and connections are faster than they’ve ever been, and our ability to communicate with each other is now effectively unlimited, given the advent of video chatting and high internet speeds. People use and rely on computers (including smartphones) for most of their working and leisure hours, and children are by default digital natives, ready to tune into whatever the next developments are.

One of the greatest developments on online technology over the last decade, and something we’ll want to focus on more later, has been the expansion and wide use of cloud storage technology. While previously things such as email have always allowed for the remote storage of files, now only terabytes impress where before a gigabyte would have been a major amount of space. Similarly, many companies, programs, and tools will use cloud storage as a matter of fact, allowing for the easy sharing of documents and projects from across the country.

And while there is so much to talk about, we don’t want to delay any further, so here are all the key statistics you should be aware of:

General Internet Statistics for 2020

Before talking about the cloud, here are some general statistics about technology and the internet in 2020:

– The size of the internet is nearly incomprehensible. To view every page online is impossible even in a thousand lifetimes, and there is more content being uploaded to the internet every day, to the tune of more than 2.5 quintillion bytes, than we would have thought possible.

– Video content is dominating the internet, and it is perhaps the one thing that can still make a dent in modern cloud storage limits. On YouTube alone 300 hours of content are uploaded every minute, and people watch about 5 billion videos a day on the platform. Soon we’ll have an average of a view per day for every person on the planet.

– And while we might like to think about the big numbers first, exploring the human side of the equations is just as important. To start with, the average user is spending 6.3 hours with digital media each day, or more than a quarter of their lives.

– There are a few companies that dominate online life, perhaps none as influential as Google. As of 2020, the search giant controlled 73.44 percent of search traffic, with Bing (the next closest competitor) only having 11.22 percent. Effectively, this means that Google dictates modern online life, at least for the mainstream user base.

* Google is even more dominant with mobile search traffic, with the company being responsible for 91.06 percent of all searches.

– Perhaps now more than ever we are learning how important ecommerce is and just how large it can become compared to the rest of the economy. In 2019, eCommerce was responsible for 14.1% of global retail sales. This is only projected to grow, although by how much is yet to be seen given recent turbulence in the economy.

– Working remotely is, whether people want to or not, becoming an exploding trend, and even last year was incredibly popular. Previously 51 percent of people worked remotely at least once a month. About 16 percent of companies exclusively hired remote workers. As a result, we’ll likely see even more new technologies and lifestyle revolve around this concept as it becomes more profitable or advantageous to do so.

Cloud Storage Statistics

Now that you have a general knowledge of the internet to get you started, here are the key cloud storage statistics you should make a note of:

• As of 2018 there were 3.6 billion cloud users. That is the vast majority of people using the internet, and the number is only likely to grow as cloud storage not only becomes more accessible, but more integral to other apps and services.
• People are even uploading some of their most sensitive information and data to cloud storage services. About 28 percent of users have uploaded sensitive data to a file sharing service, and a little more than 16 percent of files uploaded to file sharing services contain sensitive data.
• Cloud storage and services is a much bigger part of the economy than one might think. Amazon Web Services provides cloud services to a multitude of businesses and organizations, and it represented over half of the company’s profits in 2018.
• Most companies don’t use just a single cloud service. About 81 percent of companies that have more than 1000 employees use a multi-cloud strategy.
• Within the latter half of the 2010s, more than $1 trillion will be affected by the shift of information to the cloud.
• It is estimated that about 83 percent of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020. More companies are adopting it than we might have thought, given how quickly it grew in capability.

o   On a related note, 66 percent of IT professionals are primarily concerned about cloud security when adopting cloud services into their company.

There is much more that can be talked about, but ultimately your key takeaway should be that businesses are using cloud services and cloud storage more than ever before, people are trusting it more than ever, and that it will remain adaptive and growing for years to come.

Conclusion

While it hasn’t been talked about as much as when it first became a mainstream option, cloud storage remains a vital backbone of our digital lives, especially for the services we use every day and hardly think about. Without it we’d be lost, fearful for our data, and unable to perform many tasks we take for granted. Fortunately, there’s no signs of slowing for cloud storage development and development of new applications that can take advantage of this technology. Similarly, digital technologies look to be a permanent fixture of modern life, only changing in their improvements.