Today’s workplace is an entirely different animal to just five years ago – and it’s growing and changing at a rapid rate.

The huge amount of enterprise mobility solutions on the market are enabling employees to do various tasks on their smartphones and tablets; as Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on the unveiling of the Salesforce1 app, he could run his entire business from his phone.

Yet none of this could be possible without the cloud powering it, as Backupify has been investigating. The cloud provider notes that in the pre-cloud office, “computers were a mess of tangled cords and colossal towers.”

This is of course a bit of a generalisation – you can still be using towers while adopting a corporate file-sharing solution, naturally – but there are some interesting stats. It’s easy to forget that a whopping 13 floppy disks were needed to install Windows 95.

With 93% of US small and medium businesses backing up some portion of their data to the cloud, it’s evident where the trend is going. Take a look at this infographic from Backupify to see how they envisage the cloudy office: