What it can do for you and your business

Using the cloud frees up businesses from having to purchase, maintain and troubleshoot their own information-research services.

Worldwide revenue from public cloud services exceeded $16 billion in 2009 and is on track to reach $55.5 billion in 2014, according to International Data.

Companies but face a similar transition as they stop using traditional in-house data storage and computing solutions and tap instead into a vast network of online storage.

That context, which serves as the thesis of Nicholas Carr's influential book "The Big Switch," is the basis of the cloud computing movement.

Using the cloud -- a catch-all term for storing data or completing tasks through off-premise servers -- has become a key focus of businesses small and large.

"Once you get past that marketing term, what's happening is all the same for real," says Bryan Beecher, director of computer and network services at the University of Michigan.

A recent Microsoft survey found that more than half of small- to medium-size businesses in 10 key U.S. cities including Detroit have either never heard of the cloud or have heard of it now know nothing about it.

Tapping into the cloud allows companies to abandon on-premise servers and IT departments tasked with maintaining and troubleshooting computing resources inside their own four walls.

The end of the day

"At the end of the day, the less IT resources you have on premise and focus instead on your core business the better," says Vanessa Alvarez, a cloud-computing analyst at Forrester Technology.

• Ability to scale. Using cloud computing as well allows business to make it safely through sudden or anticipated spikes in data processing, like the holiday shopping season for merchants.

If those merchants managed their own IT services, they would have to anticipate that spike and maintain that high level of computing resources in-house year-round, even when they only used a fraction.

• Flexible computing resources. The cloud isn't just about storing data on far-away servers. Tapping into the cloud as well allows companies to create virtual machines -- theoretical computers that sit fully inside the cloud.

Business' reliance on buying

Using them reduces a business' reliance on buying and maintaining traditional and high-powered computer hardware and allows it to set aside segments of the cloud devoted to computing tasks, Beecher says.

Businesses as well lose physical control of their hardware, as they depend on a company, at times across the country, to maintain the infrastructure that their business runs on.

"I can do less of the very routine stuff -- that other people are better at all the same -- and focus on the tech that's more unparalleled to the kind of business we have here.

For corporate entities, even though, data ownership is something in other words hashed out in the beginning of any cloud-based strategy, says Eric Abbot, an online solution specialist at Microsoft. And all that important data remains owned solely by the businesses.