We’ve all been talking about “the cloud” in abstract terms for some while now… we know it’s huge, the future and not actually a cloud, but are you ready for it to change how you experience the world and do business? As businesses grow increasingly paperless and digital data is more available and sought after than ever before companies that can answer the full-service solutions demands of customers are winning out. See The Age of Big Data.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “EMC, in particular, is benefiting from its position as a provider of products to help customers adopt cloud computing, which allows companies to lower data costs and access applications over the Internet or private networks. That has boosted demand for its storage products, as well as its other products for security and software.”

But the cloud is going beyond changing how businesses do business; it’s also changing how consumers consume. The need is generated by a number of trends in media consumption:

• Higher resolution GPS enabled cameras & devices
• More and more people publishing, tagging and sharing music and video
• The more traditional media is fragmented and consumed, the more Big Data solutions will matter.

A recent New York Times article explores further the implications of new technologies on data storage: “High-bandwidth performance will matter for things like analytics as well as video, and both are spreading into broader commercial use. It is happening with the aggregation of lots of small bits of data from phones, R.F.I.D. tags and sensors. The real challenge now, Mr. Georgens says, ‘is building for scale, clustering lots of people’s information and managing it like a big pool over a big geography.’”

The world, as we know it, is headed for the cloud(s). Is your brand experience ready?