“They’ve bled us white – and not just from us! From our fathers, and from our fathers’ fathers!”

“And from our fathers’ father’s fathers!”

But that’s the Romans. What about the cloud?

From favourite old emails and internet banking to Twitter feeds and business expenses apps, cloud computing (or on-demand computing) is very much a part of our daily lives. But it’s not as much a part of our lives as it probably should be.

Incorporating cloud technology and services into business operations is already common practice; over 90% of UK businesses utilise on-demand computing in one form or another, yet the full potential of what cloud technology has to offer organisations is rarely realised.

Here’s an example. The business traveller drives around the country, staying overnight, grabbing breakfast, meeting over nice lunches or dinners, and as they do so, they religiously retain their receipts for all those purchases from engine fill-ups to morning coffees. Those receipts fill wallets and note spikes for days, maybe more, until finally it’s time for the expenses spreadsheets to be managed.

Once that’s done, all the expenses information is sent over to the accounting team. It’s reviewed, amended, highlighted, and then returned to the business traveller with notes and queries. In short, the business expenses nightmare has begun. Again. Yet there is a cloud-based solution for all this highly typical activity that saves paper, spreadsheets and hours of time.

An online expense management solution stores images of your receipts to the cloud, retains them there so that they are accessible and exportable from the cloud, and provides a cloud-based platform which can be utilised to establish and update company expenditure policies and workflows.

Approaching 100% of UK businesses are said to experience an improvement to their data security and risk mitigation systems as a result of moving away from manual record-keeping and in-house networks, while organisations that use cloud-based platforms to improve collaboration are said to become more efficient, more productive, and experience reductions to their operating costs and capital expenditure.

So, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what has the cloud ever done for us?