Cloud-based services, in other words, the lease of IT capacities (hardware, platform, software) creates the technological background of the other three driving forces. It provides a flexible basis for storing the data generated by mobile devices, operating social solutions, and the analytics that overarches the complex and analyses the data.

From among the big four perhaps the cloud is to most complex concept, as it means a technology, a business solution and a sales model simultaneously. It can be examined according to technical, work organisation or financial (efficiency) considerations, let alone its social and welfare effects.

In terms of economy, low investment costs (benchmark) and the predictable costs adjusted to the current needs are usually mentioned as the most important advantages offered by cloud-based services. In terms of operation, too, flexibly, fast and simply extendable capacities are worth mentioning.

In addition to high availability, however, rarely mentioned  technical considerations also pop up. Here is the question of platform independence, for instance. When the IT background of a company is provided by a “traditional” client/server architecture, the clients and servers integrated into the architecture are subject to considerable rules and requirements. The reason is that the applications used by the company do not work on just any platform. For this reason, no matter how much you want to work on a Macintosh to do your other graphical jobs, if the corporate applications (and the IT) do not support it, nothing can be done. This situation is obviously untenable in the case of BYOD, the underlying concept being “bring the device you like” and not “bring the device you are allowed to bring”. However, resolving difference between the various user devices and providing for the possibility to use several kinds of devices are still tasks to be solved (by the cloud service provider). Another task waiting for solution by the cloud is the provision of (data) integration between the various services. To this end the developers of the individual services publish interfaces for other service providers to use their functionalities (free of charge or against payment). The cloud services interconnected this way can rapidly generate highly spectacular and useful complex services (e.g. Google map service and Flightradar24).     
 
T-Systems Hungary offers its cloud-based services to its customers under the name InstantICT. Among others these include public, private and hybrid cloud solutions, depending on the sensitivity of the data managed by the required system. Within the framework of instantICT, the virtual server service called instantServer is also accessible for a trial period, automated, without establishment, truly from the cloud.