Less than two years ago, 51% of consumers believed that inclement weather would interfere with cloud computing. Although there hasn’t been a follow-up survey to determine that number today, we hope that the general public has made progress in their knowledge of the cloud.

Bad weather aside, there’s still a lot out there that even the best-informed of readers still don’t know about cloud computing. To help with that, we thought we’d take a moment to gather up a few informative facts that you probably didn’t know about the cloud. Have a look below: 

1. Over the next five years, public cloud workloads are expected to rise 44%, vs. 8.9% for on-premise. In a survey of 141 chief information officers, asset management firm Piper Jaffray found that “only 9.7% of all computing workloads are running in so-called public clouds.” That’s expected to grow 44% annually in five years’ time, compared to 8.9% growth for on-premise computing. If there were ever a clear sign that cloud computing was the way of the future, this might be it.
2. Cloud computing helps designers work better. Cloud computing isn’t all about IT geeks and managing mobile apps (as much as we love those two things!)—it’s also about making the world a better place. As an example, the city of Vancouver built “a simulated version of the entire city by combining terrain files, building footprints, satellite photos and GIS data for parcels and streets into a 3D modeling program,” enabled largely by the performance and accessibility of the cloud. From mobile apps to city simulations, cloud computing is changing the world.
3. The cloud is going green. In case you were worried about the environmental impact of large data centers popping up all over the world with the rise of the cloud, don’t worry—computer scientists at Trinity College Dublin and IBM just recently developed a new cloud computing system “that will allow companies to reduce associated greenhouse gas emissions.” This could result in as much as a 21% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and a 61% savings in electricity costs. Looks like green—not blue—may be the color of the future for the cloud.
4. There’s over 1 exabyte of data currently stored in the cloud. The research firm Nasumi estimated last February that there’s currently over an exabyte of data stored all across the cloud. An exabyte is 1,073,741,824 GB. That’s the equivalent of over 67 million 16 GB iPhones of data, or in other words, a whole heck of a lot of data currently stored in the cloud.
5. A new cloud server is added for every 120 tablets or 600 smartphones that hit the market. Intel estimates that that a new server is needed for every 120 tablets or 600 smartphones. Considering the fact that by 2015, there are set to be as many as 15 billion devices and 3.1 billion individuals connected to the internet, that adds up to a lot of servers—some 25,000,000 servers if we assumed only smartphones were used. Talk about a lot of storage space.

Although we’re still trying to wrap our heads around stormy weather’s affects on the cloud, we continue to be amazed by the scope and growth of cloud computing today. If you’d have told us 10 years ago that there would be over a billion gigabytes of data stored on a globally-accessible network, we probably would’ve told you that you were crazy—and yet, here we are.

We can’t wait to see what the next few years hold for cloud computing, but for now, the best thing we can do is stay informed and keep up on the amazing possibilities opened up by the cloud. And I suppose we’ll stay on the lookout for thunderstorms, too.