Companies in all fields, from digital services to manufacturing, are doing everything they can to upgrade their offices and maximize their information capacity. From t1 service with 60 times more data than residential modems, to colocation efforts and virtualization, we are well into an age of extreme expediency. This is all the more evident in the world of cloud computing, where shared services and synchronization attempt to liberate data from the stale prisons of hardware and render them free—well, not exactly free. Your provider still names the price. Regardless, whether you office requires a T1 line or ISDN, cloud computing will be an invaluable game-changer in most business fields. Here’s the latest in cloud news and trends:

Hewlett Packard and the cloud platform Box.net will team up to offer select customers cloud-based storage tools. One deal offers a year’s worth of unlimited storage and synchronization with the HP 8200 Elite Series PC. Traditional cloud services like remote file syncing will be included.
More banking firms are adopting cloud infrastructure into their business models. ING recently announced the development of 1.7 trillion project that will attempt to increase the use of cloud computing among major financial institutions.

While open source frameworks like OpenStack continue to gain popularity, private cloud technology have also shown a rise in demand. Many companies want the scalability of cloud computing without giving up too much in terms of security, cost, and control. Increasingly structured virtualization and PaaS chargeback are helping private clouds become practical realities and IT dreams.

Piston Cloud Computing launched pentOS for OpenStack, which could challenge Amazon Web Services, Joyent, and Rackspace. In related news, Insight Enterprises, Inc. recently announced that their cloud services had sold one million units. The company believes this is a landmark number for the entire industry, as it shows the increasingly commercial potential. In fact, analysts expect the industry to reach $150 billion by 2013.
A recent study has also come out showing that cloud computing is incredibly sustainable and may be able to reduce a company’s computing footprint by 90%. Since IT consumes about 2% of the world’s energy through telecommunications, the more efficient data centers and virtualization techniques that will result from widespread cloud services can be expected to give a much-needed refresher in energy demands.
In the coming years, observers of technology trends can expect new realities to take shape with regards to cloud computing. Software-as-a-Service will be seen not just as a cost-cutting measure but as a fundamental restructuring agent of business models themselves. One may expect it to change the nature of the way a business is run from the top down, realigning IT departments to work more fluidly with the demands of company’s investors.