Microsoft and The Cloud

Well, everybody and their dog has heard all the hype about "The Cloud" lately. And it is for good reason. Sooner or later, much or all of your content will exist in the Cloud. What is "The Cloud"? The Cloud used to be known as off site backup. For businesses or most medium to large organizations, this has been critical for many years or decades now. Systems Administrators (like me!) have fought long and hard to get Owners and CEO types to approve datacenter or colocation contracts. This is basically rented rackspace for server storage. You connect your office to this leased or rented rackspace, and voila, you have colocation. It is more complicated than this, in no small part due to networking considerations. Moving large data chunk can be a challenge.
Some organizations do not have servers onsite or in their office. They connect to a colocation facility from the get go. This is a good and safe way to set up infrastructure, but a very solid connection between the 2 sites is required, as applications, email, and databases will require this in order to be used. Also, not all datacenters are created equally. Some are more natural disaster proof and have 24/7 security, while others do not. Some organizations only use colocation for backups. Their servers are located in offices and backups are done nightly or so to the colocation. This is a decent way to do business, but if a floor or power outage takes these servers out, then there better be colocation backups available and ready for use! Another common scenario is a mix of the above. More and more organizations are moving not just data but applications to the Cloud. But it takes careful  planning and analysis.
I have installed Windows Server 2012 beta. It is very much a product of the modern age. It is heavily geared towards The Cloud and Cloud Services.

Heavy Duty Information on MS Server 2012 Cloud Services