Now a $20M business, Green Cloud is helping to put Greenville on the cloud-computing map

In the rapidly growing cloud computing industry, a small player can be worth $1 billion.So it is that the three men at the helm of Green Cloud, which last month moved into a new $7.8 million headquarters in Greenville, are humble about their 400 percent growth in revenue since 2014.The 7-year-old company did nearly $20 million in business last year. The "cloud" refers broadly to off-site hardware that stores data on behalf of clients and makes it available through the web. Public and private operations around the world are shifting their IT operations from on-site servers that eat up power and radiate heat to these off-site services, saving money in the process. According to a 2017 cloud industry report from Nasdaq Global Information Services, the cost of owning on-site IT services, including facilities, hardware, software and people to maintain them, is about 30 percent higher than cloud services. That same Nasdaq report predicted  that cloud spending would increase from the $99 billion tallied in 2016 to $205 billion by 2020.