Thanks to Microsoft’s Windows 7 commercials, the term “cloud” has moved into the mainstream.

Most people understand that “cloud” refers to applications that stream from the Internet. But there’s a lot more to it than that.
The word “cloud computing” covers a bunch of technologies, which is why Forrester Research can say that the cloud was a $40.7 billion market in 2011 and will grow to a whopping $241 billion in 2020.
A quarter of a trillion dollar market? Wowzers.
Microsoft says the cloud will create 14 million jobs by 2015, too.
But, truth be told, most folks still don’t completely understand what the “cloud” is. So let’s fix that …

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For SMB-sized IT service providers, the ubiquity of cloud services has become impossible to ignore, and more tempting than ever due to lowering costs and ease of use. The chance to strengthen your customer relationships by adopting a Cloud Service Marketplace strategy – before your competitors do – is both lucrative and attainable. Here’s five reasons why.

#1: Adoption of Cloud Services is Accelerating

Vendors of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) are continuing to see their offerings take business away from on-premise software companies. Across the industry, analysts unanimously agree that cloud service adoption is on the rise:

• Gartner predicts that global SaaS revenue could hit $21.3 billion in 2015, a 113% jump from 2010.
• According to Gatepoint Research 2011, the number of companies who will implement at least four cloud services will double from 17% to 33% over the next 2 years.
• IDC says that SaaS spending is set to grow at a pace six times faster than traditional software, with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of approximately 26% by 2014.

With top analysts predicting the continuation of aggressive growth on all fronts, 2012 is already shaping up to be the year that SMBs make a huge impact on the industry with their purchasing power. Now is the time to ensure you have a strategy in place to provide the cloud services your customers are going to be looking for.

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Taking stock of the tablet boom 
David Akka, Magic Software

With the benefits of cloud, businesses are looking to tablets as the perfect connection between the laptop and the smartphone. But can applications really be designed to be transferable across multiple devices, and more importantly, should we even want them to be? Magic Software’s David Akka explains why the tablet revolution still poses a series of questions for the enterprise.

Apple boss Tim Cook recently commented that the iPad “is on a trajectory that is off the charts”, and it does seem that tablets are at the forefront of a new era of mobility, offering users access to greater computing power anytime, anywhere.
However, with some commentators predicting that tablets will overtake the PC market in the near future, we should perhaps take a step back and consider that our devices should not be an either/ or choice. After all, smartphones, PCs and tablets all work in different ways – they all have their relative strengths and weaknesses, and are used to fulfil different requirements.

What must first be considered is how technology fits within the workplace, in the context of how employees are now using these different devices to fulfill different requirements. On one side, there are laptops and PCs, which are primarily designed for ‘heavy duty’ computing tasks in the office environment, thanks to their processing power, the large screen sizes, keyboards and mice, which provide the flexibility for users to move quickly between different screens and to input ‘heavy duty’ data.

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by Adam Dachis

The web apps and services you use are often ephemeral. Your data could disappear in an instant due to an acquisition, failure, or even a domain seizure. Although the cloud offers many advantages, you never know when it may dissipate. Here’s how you can safeguard your data in case of a shutdown and select your web apps more frugally to mitigate the risk.

In the past three days we’ve lost Gowalla, Oink, and probably Posterous. You never know when a webapp might shut down for a variety of reasons, so you don’t want to assume it’ll always be around when you need it. While most companies are good at providing you with a means of migrating your data, that isn’t always the case. Some sites, like Oink and Gowalla, are more investments of your time than explicit data. All the reviews you wrote on Oink aren’t exactly transplantable and your Gowalla check-ins aren’t going to earn you a history on the still-living Foursquare. In the case of the MegaUpload seizure, everyone’s data was suddenly unavailable and people had to resort to a law suit to even try to retrieve it. So far there has been no success. Using a web service is an investment, so you don’t want to simply sign up and hope for the best. In this post we’re going to take a look at how you can make more informed choices when selecting the webapps you’ll use and how you can keep your data safe in case your cloud service of choice disappears nonetheless.

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