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Or perhaps a small medical office in a remote community wants to do a screening for diabetic retinopathy by uploading a photo of the patient’s eye to a cloud-based machine-learning platform. The doctor would get instant results instead of sending a patient away to a larger city for a proper diagnosis.

The demand for such applications and others that save time and bring in more revenue is growing and the tech giants want a piece of the action.

“Cloud is the great equalizer. It allows very small organizations to compete with very big organizations,” said Jim Lambe, Google Cloud’s country manager for Canada. “Historically, the big organizations beat up on the small ones, but now it is the quicker organizations that are going to beat up on the slower ones.”

Photo by Google

The worldwide public cloud services market is expected to grow by 18 per cent in 2017 to US$246.8 billion, according to a report earlier this year by research company Gartner. By 2020, cloud adoption strategies are expected to influence more than 50 per cent of IT outsourcing deals.

Google has long harnessed the cloud for its own web-based services such as Gmail, YouTube and Google Docs, but the tech giant decided to double down on the space after seeing the number of other companies that want their own cloud platforms to quickly grow.

Google said it considers itself one of the few which can properly lead the space given the high upfront cost for new entrants to develop the infrastructure, such as large data centres, needed to provide cloud storage.