The media reported Alphabet Inc-CL C.The latest cloud strategy, the two main businesses it is about to develop is a technology called "multi-cloud", which uses data stored in multiple clouds to handle the same task. And "distributed cloud", that is, to build small data centers in various regions to further reduce the speed of data processing.

Alphabet Inc-CL C's giant data center is the palace of the information age. They are built to serve billions of consumers and are the search company's foray into cloud computing, a market that could one day be bigger than advertising.

This week, however, Alphabet Inc-CL C tried to adopt a different strategy. In order to catch up with Amazon.Com Inc in the field of cloud computingAnd Microsoft CorpIt takes a step outside its own data center. In the process, it shows people the two most important trends that shape the future of cloud computing (and the future of the IT world).

One of them is called multi-cloud. As the name implies, it involves using a series of different public cloud resources to handle a computing task. For customers, it reduces the risk of being locked in by a single cloud provider, and for Alphabet Inc-CL C, it also has the opportunity to become an important player in this belated market.

At present, the search company is in the distant third place in the field of cloud computing. Its Alphabet Inc-CL C cloud platform has become one of the company's most promising businesses: Jeffery analysts estimate that its revenue will grow 56% this year to $10.4 billion. But it will still lag far behind Amazon.Com Inc's $61 billion for online services and Microsoft Corp's $37 billion for Azure.

At the annual cloud computing conference this week, Alphabet Inc-CL C unveiled a data warehouse service that makes use of data that exists in different clouds, not just his own. If customers already have a lot of data in Amazon.Com Inc's S3 storage service, then this is a way for Alphabet Inc-CL C to use it for his own service.

Breaking the boundaries of the cloud like this can turn data storage into a commodity or, more accurately, prevent storage services from becoming something that connects customers to other higher-value services of cloud providers.

This also highlights Alphabet Inc-CL C's advantage in the cloud computing war. The search company likes to trumpet the efficiency and security of its IT infrastructure, but the real advantage may lie in higher-value services such as data analytics and artificial intelligence, which have been honed in its huge consumer services.

Another important trend highlighted by Alphabet Inc-CL C this week is moving cloud computing near customers. This means not concentrating computing in large data centers, but building smaller facilities to handle some of the work locally, that is, creating so-called distributed clouds.

The same software and single interface are used to control these remote computing resources, but customers have the ability to keep their data locally, resulting in faster response times. As the demand for real-time processing of large amounts of data increases, the power to push computing to the edge of the network (note: the junction of the local network and the Internet) is likely to grow.

Amazon.Com Inc and Microsoft Corp were the first to come up with the idea, launching services called Outposts and Azure Stack respectively. However, cloud computing still accounts for only 5-10% of the global IT market: this slow-growing revolution is still in a relatively early stage, and there is plenty of time for the three companies to build huge businesses around this idea.

Moving data storage and processing closer to customers can lead to a new market for smaller local operators, known as "edge" computing.

Although the software to coordinate these different networks will still come from a few dominant operators, this does not mean that huge single clouds will dominate future computing. They will also support a greater variety of local participants.

All this marks a major shift for Alphabet Inc-CL C, who has always shown a high degree of technological self-confidence (some also call it arrogance). Its early cloud computing strategy, which built the best technology and assumed that customers would visit automatically, did not succeed. However, adapting to a more heterogeneous IT world and serving customers who already rely on multiple suppliers will also open up a new path for Alphabet Inc-CL C.

Ed Anderson, an analyst at Gartner Consulting, said: "Alphabet Inc-CL C has always been an innovation engine, and what we are seeing now is that it is starting to shift its focus to the outside world."

Microsoft Corp and Amazon.Com Inc will no doubt have more views on these topics in their annual cloud computing events in the coming weeks. When they confront each other in cloud computing, it will at least be a market where big tech giants compete with each other in fierce competition.

This article is edited from the Canadian Financial and Economic Network; Zhitong Financial Editor: Wen Wen.