Everything’s coming up mobile these days. Gartner estimates that PC sales will make up only about 13 percent of device sales in 2013—and some undisclosed portion of those PCs are notebooks. The more we rely on small, mobile devices to get things done, the more we also depend on cloud storage and services to extend functionality beyond what the mobile device itself is capable of. That’s why mobile and cloud will become mobile cloud.

The IEEE Computer Society lists mobile cloud as one of its Top Technology Trends for 2014. IEEE explains, “Mobile devices are constrained by their memory, processing power, and battery life. But combined with cloud computing, data processing and storage can happen outside of mobile devices.”

Storage is a major constraint for most mobile devices. Smartphones typically have only 8GB or 16GB of local storage, while tablets tend to have 32GB or more but still max out at 128GB. Ultrabooks, and many notebook PCs, have abandoned traditional hard drives in favor of solid state drives (SSD), which are typically only 128GB or 256GB. There are larger SSDs, but they’re prohibitively expensive for most purposes.

The cloud, on the other hand, has virtually limitless storage. Whether you use Box, or Dropbox, or SkyDrive, or Google Drive, you can add gigabytes or even terabytes of data that are accessible from your mobile device as long as you have a Wi-Fi or cellular signal to connect to the cloud.

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