Imagine your PC and all of your mobile devices (smartphone, tablet, ipad, laptop, netbook, etc) being in sync—all the time. Imagine being able to access all of your personal data at any given moment. Imagine having the ability to organize and mine data from any online source. Imagine being able to share that data with your coworkers in an instant. This is what cloud computing promises to deliver.

Whether you realize it or not, you're probably already using cloud-based services. Pretty much everyone with a computer has been. Gmail and Google Docs are two prime examples; we just don't think of those services in those terms.

In essence, cloud computing means having every piece of data you need for every aspect of your business life at your fingertips and ready for use. Data must be mobile, transferable, and instantly accessible. The key to enabling the portable and interactive you is the ability to synch up your data among your devices, as well as access to shared data. Shared data is the data we access online in any number of places, such as social networks, banks, blogs, newsrooms, paid communities, etc.

Today's cloud originated because the typical enterprise application was too bloated and required too much maintenance and support. They were also all-or-nothing affairs. You didn't just pay for what you used. Rather, you paid for all of the features that came with the software, even if only a small percentage of the features were applicable to you.  You paid for all the infrastructure you might use at peak times, all of the time.

When service providers offered a different delivery model, and, more importantly, different pricing models, companies realized that they no longer needed to pay for and manage heavy infrastructures for things like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.

What does this mean for the consumer in the workplace? We're heading toward being able to data mine on the fly. What most consumers will notice is that it's getting easier and easier to have a consistent experience whether you're on your phone, PC, or some other Internet-enabled device. Smartphones already deliver this to a degree. Browser-based e-mail and popular e-mail programs like Outlook sync up easily with smartphones.

There's also analytics-driven data mining for Internet data and the ability to synch it up, as well as categorize it across all your devices. Say you're researching cloud computing for a business meeting. You decide there's an intersection between cloud computing, analytics, data mining, and business intelligence. You have, somewhere on your PC, articles about each of these subjects that you've collected over the years. With personal cloud tools, you could ask your hard drive for all of these articles, as well as those you find on the Internet, to be retrieved and regrouped under the title "personal cloud," with subcategories and cross references, and all of this would be synched to all of your devices. Think about the number of hours, perhaps days, of busy work this could save.   Let's face facts: We're moving to a cloud-based computing society—some of us faster than others. And it's a fascinating prospect—once you get past all the jargon.

Cloud computing provides some strong benefits and economic incentives. Selecting a public, private, hybrid or community cloud implementation will depend on a customer’s specific application, performance, security and compliance requirements. Proper deployment can provide significant savings, better IT services and a higher level of reliability.