From streaming television to Gmail, now it’s all about the cloud

Whether you’re watching your favorite show on Netflix or backing up all-important cat photos to Google Drive, the “cloud” has become an essential part of our digital lives. No, not those large white bodies of water vapor floating through the sky -- the tech definition simply refers to having servers in remote datacenters handling programs or data that people or businesses can access anywhere from devices of their choosing.

“You name it, it’s happening in the cloud,” analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group said. “It’s really where everything is being done now.” Century-old technology stalwart IBM is making a $34 billion bet on cloud computing in the form of a mega-deal to buy Red Hat, a pioneering proponent of the open source movement that arose to counter giants like Microsoft whose models were based on keeping their source code secret. Here is a look at the trend and its allure to technology titans such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM.