A Sky Full of Clouds: A Tech Revelation

By Elke Porter | WBN News Vancouver | June 2, 2025
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Before I attended Web Summit Vancouver 2025, I’ll admit it—I thought the cloud was just a single mysterious thing floating somewhere in cyberspace, storing photos, files, and millions of other bits of data. In my mind, it was one invisible, magical storage box in the sky. That was it.

But as I walked through the buzzing halls of the Vancouver Convention Centre, weaving through rows of startup booths and major tech brands, I kept hearing about different kinds of cloud services—each offering something slightly different. Microsoft had its own cloud, so did Amazon, Google, IBM, and even smaller companies I'd never heard of. Each one promoted unique features, tools, and capabilities. That’s when it hit me: there’s not just one cloud—there are many!

And not only that—these clouds come in different shapes and sizes. They are not white, they do not float and there are thousands of them. The more I listened, the more I realized how layered and dynamic the cloud ecosystem really is.

What Are the Different Types of Clouds?

Cloud services fall into a few major categories based on how they’re used:

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This gives businesses access to basic computing resources—like servers and storage—without having to maintain physical hardware. Think of it as renting space in a giant digital warehouse.
Platform as a Service (PaaS): This is a developer’s playground. It provides a framework and tools to build, test, and launch applications without worrying about the infrastructure underneath.
Software as a Service (SaaS): These are the apps we use every day—email services, calendars, document editors—all run on the cloud, ready to use without any installations or updates.

Deployment Models: How Clouds Are Structured

Beyond the type of service, clouds are also categorized by how they’re deployed. Here’s a simple breakdown:

Public Clouds: These are shared environments managed by providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. They’re cost-effective and scalable—perfect for startups or anyone needing on-demand resources.
Private Clouds: Built for one organization, these can be run on-site or hosted externally. They offer greater control and security, making them ideal for industries with strict regulations.
Hybrid Clouds: A combination of public and private, connected through secure networks. This setup allows organizations to keep sensitive operations private while still benefiting from the public cloud’s flexibility.
Multi-Clouds: This strategy uses more than one cloud provider to avoid dependency on a single vendor. It boosts resilience and gives companies the freedom to choose the best tools for each task.

Data Centres

Data centres are concentrated in regions like the United States (5,381 centres as of March 2024), Germany, the UK, China, and Canada, with the U.S. hosting nearly 46% of the global total. Europe, Asia, Latin America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Africa also have significant presence, though distribution is uneven, with Africa accounting for only 2% of global cloud zones. Data sovereignty laws, such as GDPR in the EU, require data to be stored locally in some cases, leading to regional data centres to ensure compliance.

A Cloudy Awakening

Walking away from Web Summit, I felt both amazed and slightly amused by my earlier assumptions. What I thought was just one cloud turned out to be a whole atmosphere of possibilities. It’s not just a storage space—it’s a system powering everything from AI to health apps to international business operations.

Lesson learned: when it comes to clouds, one size definitely doesn’t fit all.

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