The use of highly scaled, shared, and automated IT platforms"”known as cloud computing"”is growing rapidly. Adopters are driven by the prospects of increasing agility and gaining access to more computing resources for less money. Large institutions are building and managing private-cloud environments internally (and, in some cases, procuring access to external public clouds) for basic infrastructure services, development platforms, and whole applications. Smaller businesses are primarily buying public-cloud offerings, as they generally lack the scale to set up their own clouds. But as attractive as cloud environments can be, they also come with new types of risks.

GT Nexus Inc. and TradeCard Inc. have announced a merger agreement that will create a single cloud-technology platform for global trade and supply-chain management.

Consumer-oriented collaboration and file-sharing tools that have gained popularity as the workforce becomes increasingly mobile are customarily cheap, even free, for employees to use. But they could be costing businesses plenty, a recent study suggests.

As if corporations didn't have enough money sitting idle in their accounts today - now we learn that they've been borrowing aggressively, spurred on by record-low interest rates.

A few weeks back I referenced the work of Robert J. Gordon, an economist and professor at Northwestern University. In a paper published last September for the Centre for Economic Research, he laid out the history of the first three industrial revolutions. And he asked whether a fourth, supposedly driven by the internet and other advances in information technology, could come anywhere near its predecessors in terms of productivity improvements.