The variety with which companies large and small are adopting cloud computing underscores its evolving nature and the opportunities that await Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others, according to Sean Feeney, cloud practice director at digital consultancy Nerdery.

"Consumer expectations have changed," says Arpit Jain, vice president of cross-functional delivery and capabilities at Nerdery, a digital services consultancy. "We have higher expectations, and we want lower friction."

A use case that is ripe for XR is assigning semi-retired employees to coach inexperienced field-service workers from afar, says Joe Tobolski, who as CTO of consultancy Nerdery advises tech leaders on XR and other digital implementations.

“Tiny sensors scattered throughout a house can detect trace levels of airborne substances like mold and alert the homeowner before they reach a harmful level,” explained Scott Russ, security architect at Nerdery. In some ways, IoT is like having a guardian angel for your home.

This might involve what Nerdery data science director Justin Richie terms a “data lake.” That’s a data storage system, usually cloud-based, that allows companies to store their data without “connecting” it. The company pools this data in order to derive insights later, Richie says.

Data lakes make it easy to store any kind of data, which is useful to accommodate unexpected workloads. Most AWS data lakes likely start with S3, an object storage service. "Object storage is a great fit for unstructured data," said Sean Feeney, cloud engineering practice director at Nerdery.