Cloud computing is getting the red carpet treatment, and looking for ways to take its status to the next level.  The trends around cloud computing are headed to mainstream arenas, finding new niches to fill and problems to address.  This statement sums up the recent study from Hosting.com, gathering interesting results from nearly 600 IT and business leaders. As one of the key advances in technology for the last 10 years, the cloud has had its pros and cons, but is believed to go mainstream in 2011. It’s in part due to growing hosting solutions, anchoring the web flow and torrent of data.

The study revolves around 3 set of figures:

• 44%: said that cloud computing is now a top priority among decision makers of companies, especially that it’s becoming a portion of a resellers successful formula.  The number will soon dictate how these enterprises will utilize cloud-based solutions in the next 12 months.
• 80%: is now seriously considering shifting from traditional servers to cloud computing. This trend is brought about by the need to alleviate damages with unexpected disaster and business continuity.
• 5 times: this rate will be the predicted increase in planned implementation of cloud services such as disaster recovery and application hosting this year.

Web hosting, being an essential element of cloud computing, along with disaster recovery, will drive cloud adoption at an exceptionally fast rate. This could explain reasons behind recent upgrades and developments within Amazon and Rackspace. Soon after sealing a deal with Aspera for demand in big data, Amazon launched a complete web hosting service via Simple Storage Service or S3. S3 was introduced 4-5 years ago, but a stronger platform now offers full website hosting that is easy and can define root and error in documents for each bucket.

Amazon has set a trend in the cloud that is worth emulating. Industry competitor Rackspace has dedicated resources to develop a “big name” that will create a new advisory board for the OpenStack project. The details will be revealed during the next OpenStack conference and design summit, scheduled for April 26-29 in Santa Clara, California.

Chairman of the OpenStack project-oversight committee and Rackspace Cloud founder, Jonathan Bryce said in an interview: “We definitely anticipate [that the advisory board] will be in place prior to April’s design summit. He did not say what industry or customer brains Rackspace is recruiting.”

For organizations out there that are in the look-out for a cloud provider, the three main characteristics that you should evaluate are: reliability and security of infrastructure, low price and integration.