The battle of the computing clouds is intensifying

HOW MUCHITCEO have you spent on the cloud today? It takes Robert Hodges only a few clicks to find out. He pulls up a dashboard on a computer in his home office in Berkeley, California, which shows cloud spending at his database firm, Altinity, in real time. The cloud represents half of Altinity’s total costs.Mr Hodges’s widget is a window onto the future. As bills soar, every firm of any size will need to understand not just the benefits of the cloud, but also its costs. Gartner, a consultancy, calculates that spending on public-cloud services will reach nearly 10% of all corporate spending on information technology () in 2021, up from around 4% in 2017. Plenty of technophile startups spend 80% of their revenues on cloud services, estimate Sarah Wang and Martin Casado of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm. The situation is analogous to a century ago, when electric power became an essential input (and prompted some firms to hire another kind of : the chief electricity officer).