It’s been decades-long in coming, but the bulk of hype around cloud computing could be gone by the end of 2013, thanks to a steady maturation of the underlying technology and more sophisticated IT use.

This is good news for companies hoping to a make the leap from local servers to managed stacks.

Terms of endearment

“Enterprise cloud” carries the lion’s share amount of hype, and has for the past few years, says CIO. This term is a catch-all for cloud services, and has been overused as a way to describe alternatives to public clouds, most of which take the form of public clouds in disguise.

IT pros are now fully aware that bolt-on virtualisation solutions, for example, aren’t precursors to the cloud, and with cloud security now robust enough to handle even mission critical data, the days of taking potshots at public providers because they’re …