In the current technology world it seems that everything is "moving to the cloud". On a commercial level, many key business tools such as Microsoft Office have become cloud-based (Office 365). On a personal level, our iPhone and Android music, pictures and videos are saved and backed-up to the cloud. So what is "the cloud" anyway?

The Cloud is a really just a collection of data centers. A data center is made up of racks of data servers nestled inside a secure, always powered, always connected, disaster-resistant building. They come in many shapes and sizes from the 1.3 Million square foot Citadel in Reno, to a room tucked away in a multi-use office building. By this broad definition, there are three million data centers in the US. That's one (1) data center for every 100 people. Google by itself owns eight (8) data centers around the world. With the increasing need for connectivity and the growing importance of data we will see an additional 4,000 more data centers built in the US in the next 2 years. So how does business technology and more specifically, voice communications take advantage of the cloud?