Four out of five executives agree: choosing the cloud is a smart value proposition.

Research from Host Analytics and conducted by Dimensional Research found that for four out of five business execs, the cloud is chosen for its value over any other factor, according to an article on CloudComputingNews.net.

A similar number of employees surveyed said that it's beneficial for them to use cloud applications.

The research talked to more than 300 CIOs and business executives and found various benefits to cloud adoption, which may perhaps shift the balance as IT budgets are being prepared for 2013.

When asked for the reasons a cloud app was chosen over other, on-premise options, the disparity between business executives and CIOs was stark.

Value was the obvious factor for execs (80%), whereas compliance was the most important component for CIOs (58%); value (53%) and greater competitive advantage (51%) completed the top three.

Compliance is a vital and underrated reason for utilizing the cloud. Sixty-one percent of survey respondents said they have out-of-date, business-critical software, and 14% said their on-premise software hadn't been upgraded in four or more years.

More than one in three CIOs stated that while their company didn't have plans for any solution, the cloud seemed a better fit.

Health Care Cloud Computing Market Continues to Grow
Cloud computing will continue to play a larger role in hospitals and health-care facilities in 2013 and beyond.

The cloud computing market in health care is estimated to grow at an annual rate of 20.5 percent from 2012 to 2017, according to an article on DigitalJournal.com.

Cloud services are expected to help offset costs related to compliance while providing physicians and patients instant access to medical records.

Health-care organizations typically contend with limited budgets to meet increasing product and service demands, while complying with new regulations and health care reform legislations. Many health-care organizations are also struggling to manage and optimize their complex IT systems, so that patients and physicians can be provided instant online access to information, products and services through their desktops and mobile devices - for faster health care delivery.

All these requirements have driven health-care organizations towards adoption of cloud technology and are expected to contribute to its growth in the near future. The market in 2011 was dominated by Non-Clinical Information Systems, contributing the largest share, although the market for Clinical Information Systems is expected to grow at a higher CAGR of 27.1 percent from 2012 to 2017.

North America accounts for the largest share in the cloud computing market, with the U.S. being the largest contributor to this region. Europe's share is expected to decrease to 16% by 2017 due to the lack of government regulations as stringent as that of the U.S. and since the healthcare industry has been latent to adopt technology. North America is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 23.8%.

Cloudant Expands Global Reach Through Collaboration With Rackspace
Cloudant has moved into a new realm, announcing it has joined the Cloud Tools program for Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company.

The company also revealed the immediate availability of its NoSQL database as a service (DBaaS) for Web and mobile applications across the global Rackspace open cloud, according to an article on TalkinCloud.com.

The collaboration allows developers using Rackspace's open cloud to benefit from Cloudant as an application data layer that scales up or down on-demand through a simple management interface.

"Now that Cloudant is working with Rackspace, our customers have even more choices for dedicated, global cloud hosting of their data," said Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle. "Cloudant customers deploy highly distributed, data-intensive, real-time applications, which is an ideal fit with Rackspace open cloud's global reach and tremendous performance."

The Cloudant Data Layer is a collection of database clusters that are hosted and scaled across multiple Rackspace data centers around the globe. With a CouchDB-compatible, RESTful JSON API, an incremental MapReduce engine, and built-in full-text search based on Apache Lucene, Cloudant delivers low-latency, highly-available data layer performance and pushes dynamic data distribution closer to the network edge.