By Jon Smith

With more and more firms looking to cut down on digital storage space in 2013, one area of IT management that is set to expand is the reliance on cloud computing. The cloud industry is still in its relative infancy, although there are already key trends that are expected to develop in the industry this year.

Integrated cloud and mobile

The reliance between mobile and cloud activities is expected to become all the stronger in 2013.

More and more mobile applications are linked to cloud back-end services and the majority of cloud services have a mobile application. One firm proving this link is CloudOn, which aims to optimise Microsoft services for mobile devices. The company’s software is hosted on an application housed in the Amazon Web Services cloud.

Personal clouds

In the old days, an employee’s computer would be the one location where information is …