The outage that hit the world's leading cloud provider Amazon Web Services on Monday has highlighted global reliance on the technology, which offers businesses on-demand IT resources without heavy investment in expensive server farms.

In its most widespread form, the so-called "public" cloud relies on shared data centres, where clients hire IT capacity. The "private" cloud", on the other hand, consists of dedicated machines reserved for a single company.

The United States dominates the global market for cloud computing.

AWS held 30 percent of the market share in the second quarter of this year, followed by Microsoft Azure (20 percent) and Google Cloud (13 percent), according to the Synergy Research Group.

These three firms have been dubbed "The Big Three".

The AWS outage made part of

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