Small and medium-sized businesses have a difficult task competing with larger firms that have more financial resources, giving enterprises the ability to invest in more advanced technologies.

When the cloud was first introduced to the private sector, companies were hesitant to adopt the technology because of perceived data security inadequacies.

During the past year, the United States has fallen victim to an increasing number of weather-related disasters, including floods, tornadoes, wildfires and more.

Similar to businesses in the private sector, the federal government also has a plan to ease the adoption of cloud computing services throughout the public sector.

While the cloud continues to disrupt a large portion of the private sector, decision-makers need to do a better job at educating employees on the benefits of the technology.

Companies considering using the cloud cannot jump headfirst into the technology. Instead, decision-makers need to establish a plan of attack as to how the cloud hosting services will be rolled out.

When an organization begins to leverage the public cloud, decision-makers essentially give away their servers, networks and sensitive information to service providers.

A recent survey by Taneja Group and InfoStor revealed that only 29 percent of respondents were protecting information in cloud storage environments, meaning the majority of users were susceptible to data breaches.

Monitoring applications becomes a critical part of a cloud management strategy after an organization has migrated services to the hosted environment.

A new report by service provider Alcatel-Lucent revealed that the global cloud computing market will generate up to $177 billion in revenue by 2015.