The technology sector is suffering from its worst stretch of stock market performance since the global financial crisis in 2008. The Nasdaq-100 index plunged 33% last year, and while it has bounced by 12% in the early innings of 2023, investors have continued to face immense volatility. 

The good news is that the index rarely falls two years in a row. In fact, that has only happened once in the 37-year history of the Nasdaq-100, which means there's a good chance that it will deliver a positive return overall in 2023. However, its component companies will still have to contend with challenges like high inflation, rising interest rates, and a shaky regional banking sector.

For investors with both short-term and long-term horizons, there are growing opportunities in the cloud computing sector as the widespread adoption of those technologies by businesses continues. According to one estimate by Grand View Research, the cloud computing industry could be worth $1.5 trillion annually by 2030. Here's why that growth forecast points to healthy upsides for stocks like Snowflake (SNOW) and DigitalOcean (DOCN), particularly from their presently beaten-down levels.

Snowflake is built for a world with mass cloud adoption

Since Snowflake went public in September 2020, it has routinely grown its revenue by triple-digit percentages annually, making it one of the fastest-growing tech companies investors could buy. But in this period of broader economic weakness, businesses are investing less money in their digital transformations, so in the company's fiscal 2023, which ended Jan. 31, its revenue growth rate slowed to "only" 70%.

Plus, based on the bleak outlook, Snowflake expects its revenue to grow by a much slower 40% in its fiscal 2024. That, in combination with the broader tech sell-off, helps explain why its stock price has plunged 64% from its all-time high. But investors shouldn't lose sight of this company's long-term potential because economic weakness won't persist forever.

Snowflake's Data Cloud is designed to aggregate complex cloud networks for large organizations that might be using multiple cloud services providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Alphabet's Google Cloud. It's designed to eliminate data silos and allow companies to gain maximum visibility over their entire data landscape, and it also provides a powerful analytics engine to help them draw value from that information.

Now, Snowflake has also set out to disrupt traditional application development with its Snowpark platform. Developers within large organizations tend to code across different programming languages, which can lead to fragmented projects, data silos, and complicated architectures. Snowpark brings all of those languages together onto a single platform, which streamlines development initiatives. 

The tools Snowflake provides will only grow in importance as companies increasingly rely on the cloud. As a result, it is one of few big tech organizations that has been hiring more employees recently rather than looking to trim its workforce. During its fiscal 2023, it expanded its headcount by 1,892 to 5,884 in total, even as many of its peers engaged in layoffs. 

That's a clear signal the company expects to deliver strong growth in the medium term, so investors might want to take advantage of its heavily discounted stock price -- especially if a new bull market is around the corner. 

DigitalOcean is an ideal entry point to the cloud for small businesses

DigitalOcean is a niche provider of cloud services for a specific cohort of customers. It's focused on start-ups and small to mid-sized businesses with fewer than 500 employees, so it provides an on-ramp into the cloud for many enterprises. 

Serving smaller organizations requires a different approach than serving big ones. They don't typically have their own technical teams in-house, so they need a higher level of support and a platform that makes deployment quick and easy. Plus, of course, transparent, affordable pricing is vital for businesses that are just starting out. 

It isn't economical for larger cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure to meet those needs because they make their money at scale -- it's more profitable for them to serve one customer that spends $1 million per year rather than it is to serve 100 customers that spend $10,000 each. 

Last quarter, 86% of DigitalOcean's revenue came from customers spending $50 or more per month, and at the end of 2022, it had 144,200 of them. Moreover, in the fourth quarter, its revenue grew by 36% year over year, outpacing the top three cloud giants AWS (20%), Azure (31%), and Google Cloud (32%). 

For the full year 2022, DigitalOcean brought in $576.3 million in revenue. That's a mere sliver of the value of the cloud market for small to mid-sized businesses, which is forecast to be $98 billion this year. It's predicted to grow at a compound annual rate of 26% to $195 billion by 2026 -- even faster than the overall cloud market's forecast annual growth rate of 14.1%. 

DigitalOcean stock has been crushed under the weight of the broader tech sell-off in the last 18 months. It's down 72% from its all-time high, and now trades near its cheapest price-to-sales ratio since it became a public company. That spells opportunity for investors.