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After years of data center growth and IT evolution, many businesses are left living with complex, overgrown computing platforms that are chronically underutilized. These systems take up valuable data center floor space, depreciate quickly, consume large amounts of power and cooling resources, and can cause management headaches. Plus, this rigid architecture makes it hard for an IT organization to quickly adapt or respond to changing business demands, and it makes it difficult to share resources throughout an enterprise, in order to increase utilization and improve efficiency.

By providing resources as a service, cloud computing addresses these fundamental data center challenges. Some examples of applications include software as a service (SaaS), Customer Relationship Management, file storage, file synchronization and file back-up. It's now possible for businesses to have their own private cloud, which incorporates specific services and is only accessible to specific people.

Earlier this month, Google Docs received a number of updates and new features to help improve user experience. Now Google has focused its attention on Presentations and introduced a new feature called Discussions for easy collaboration with others, and more than 50 new features.We’ve all been frustrated by technology that gets slower, less reliable and less useful over time. But Google Apps is different. It actually gets better week after week, without patches or updates to manage. People can absorb this stream of innovation without being distracted from their workflow.

Desktop calendar applications are great if you're always at your desk or if you're diligent about synchronizing with your tablet or smartphone. But if you like to travel light, it may be time for you to switch to a calendar that you can access from any Internet terminal. Also, you have a club, team or company and you want to be sure that everyone knows about upcoming events or everyone is available in a specific day and hour for an important business meeting.

Google has added a new Research bar to Google Docs to help users browse Google for information while working on an article or paper. Google Docs' new sidebar appears along the right-hand side of your document and will show you different types of results: web results, images, quotations, maps, reviews, and more.

The feature can be invoked from Docs' Tools menu, by keyboard shortcut, or perhaps in the most useful way, by right-clicking on any word in the document area. You can narrow your search to specific types of results by using the drop-down menu in the search bar. A search bar produces similar results to a traditional query, but with the added ability to immediately embed found text or objects into the document area, along with appropriate citations wherever possible.

Technology inevitably gets more complicated as it gets older. Therefore, upgrading platforms and adding more features will make your systems increasingly difficult to manage and complex to use. So, at times like these, your company needs an approach based on entirely modern technologies, designed for today’s world. Your company needs Google Apps.

Part of Google Apps, Google Sites makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. With Google Sites you can build any website (intranet, corporate website, team, project, department, wikis and more) and share rich content (documents, spreadsheets, presentations, video documents, forms, images, etc) without having to write code. But you don't want that everything you displayed on those sites to be seen by everyone. Or you want that certain people in your company have access to a limited number of documents posted on the Google Sites, but not all. With page-level permissions, you will be able to control who can view and edit your Google Site on a page by page basis.

There may be times when you don’t have an Internet connection, like on an airplane or train without wireless Internet, but you still want access to a file you’ve saved in Google Docs. Now, Google made it possible. So, you can select any file in Google Docs to make it available offline. So regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet, you’re always connected to those files. And this option is available for PC, Notebook, Smartphone or Tablet.

From Government departments through small local companies, information can be extremely valuable to organizations. However, this useful information often ends up trapped in files or databases, inaccessible to the average employee or user. Also, the explosion of information stored in multiple formats that needs to be accessed by both internal staff and a distributed workforce (dealers, vendors, etc) only complicates the problem. The need for organizations to quickly respond to market changes, innovate, and accelerate their time to market increased in direct proportion to their structural complexity. So, it’s no wonder that 39% of a knowledge worker’s time is wasted on searching for information or recreating existing content.

Businesses of all sizes need to be prepared for the unexpected. In legal actions, a business can be required to turn over all emails on a topic, or between certain employees. It's a huge and expensive headache to hunt down these emails, especially for smaller businesses who don't have dedicated IT staff. Even then, there's no guarantee they'll really get everything relevant.

When it comes to the cost of the cloud, it is important to analyze all cloud`s models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Those three different service models for the delivery of cloud computing provide companies with the ability to mix and match the best service model to the business needs of their organization, based on requirements and payment options and depending on the vertical industry and specific applications portfolio.