CLOUD IS THE GREAT EQUALIZER.

have lost the last 15 years,” Brian Stevens, chief technical officer of Google Cloud, said in an interview during a recent visit to the company's Toronto office.

“The size of the opportunity is well understood to be massive and Google believes this is going to be one of the biggest businesses, if not the biggest business, inside of Google sometime in the future. We feel like we are really set up for it.”

It's not just Google that offers the cloud for both storage and machine learning or artificial intelligence data analysis. Other major players have existed in the space for just as long, if not longer. So far they have more market share, too.

Amazon.com Inc. helped pioneer cloud-based storage platforms by creating Amazon Web Services back in 2006. Microsoft Corp.'s Azure debuted in 2010 and Google Cloud Platform came along in 2011 to round out the heavyweights, but others such as IBM and specialty places like Montreal, we are bringing up new data centres in under a year, which is pretty fast paced.”

In addition to opening data centres within Canada — which allows companies to keep sensitive information from leaving the country, something important for regulated sectors such as banking and health care — Google's myriad cloud initiatives have Canadian ties.

The tech giant's Waterloo, Ont., office of about 500 has long been responsible for helping with web-based services such as Gmail, so the company has been looking north of the border for expertise as it focuses more on its Google Cloud offerings.

“We have teams working here on a number of different efforts within cloud that contribute to the way that the Google Cloud platform will be successful for all of the different services around the world,” said Derek Phillips, an engineering director at Google's Waterloo office and an 11-year employee