The wave started last year when Time Warner Cable, the telecommunications company serving much of the Eastern United States, spent $230 million to purchase NaviSite, a provider of cloud services for businesses.

CenturyLink has agreed to buy hosting company Savvis for about US$2.5 billion in cash and shares, the companies announced Wednesday.

Telstra plans to become its own Cloud tenant in a bid to push its Cloud computing ventures to a wider set of customers.

What a difference a year makes. Twelve months ago it was almost impossible to find Australian organisations that had embraced cloud computing. Now pretty much everyone is planning, piloting or executing some form of migration to the cloud. If there was ever doubt that cloud was little more than hype, it was eradicated in April 2010 by Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) group executive for enterprise services and chief information officer, Michael Harte. In a speech to Committee for Economic Development in Australia, Harte declared that never again did he wish to be locked into using proprietary hardware or software and cloud computing was his escape route.