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MasterCard and Microsoft announced a new strategic initiative to market and sell Microsoft's cloud productivity service, Office 365. You can get an automatic 10% discount when you buy through their easysavings.com discount program and use your MasterCard. There are several plans that start at $6 per user per month for less than 50 seats (undiscounted).

I got another email from Backupify, the cloud-based backup company. We have written before about them here. Usually, these emails just confirm that the backups of my Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter et al. accounts have completed successfully, but this one was different. They were telling me that they were in the process of migrating from an old system to a new one, and I had until the end of the month to make sure that my accounts were protected and authorized on the new system.

Classy.

A few recent legal developments affecting U.S. online privacy have rightfully troubled privacy advocates and civil libertarians on American soil. In addition to the Patriot Act's relaxed regulation of law enforcement's access to private data, recent court rulings have made it clear that U.S. authorities can secretly request data from tech companies without the user ever knowing.

If this seems objectionable from the standpoint of U.S. citizens, imagine how it looks to outsiders who are storing their data there. Some European companies who do business with U.S. technology companies are concerned enough to start looking elsewhere for infrastructure.

Cloud storage provider Box.net is moving to expand its reach beyond simple file sharing with a series of investments, partnerships and software extensions called the Box Innovation Network. They plan on investing two million dollars over the next two years to encourage a variety of add-on development around their core technology, as well as encourage more main-line enterprise software developers to use their resources and cloud services.

Today we're beginning a series exploring the world of cloud services from a consumer's point of view. The word "cloud" refers to an online repository for your software, applications and data. Steve Jobs called this a "digital hub" and, as he explained to his biographer Walter Issacson, "over the next few years, the hub is going to move from your computer into the cloud." Even if you're not an Apple user, the move to a cloud hub is coming your way no matter whose hardware you use. It's going to be a big transition.

We have a special channel devoted to exploring the Cloud from a business point of view, called ReadWriteCloud. But over the past year it's become increasingly apparent that cloud services will soon rule the lives of consumers too. Which cloud service, or combination of cloud services, is right for you?

The financial services industry is warming up to the idea of using the cloud for some of its critical computing needs. More than half of bank transactions will be supported by cloud-based infrastructure and software by 2015, according to a recent report from Gartner.

That is the expectation of about 39% of financial services CIOs worldwide, according to the survey. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 44% of CIOs for banking firms expect that more than half of their institutions' transactions will take place via infrastructure that lives in the cloud, and 33% expect most of them will be processed using some type of SaaS application.

As anybody who's spent long stretches of time on the phone with customer support knows, the help desk is one area of professional life that could use a refresh. This is true of external customer support departments, which are beginning to use social tools to augment their existing operations. It's also true of the internal IT help desk.

We're already seeing clues about the future of the IT help desk today. The workforce is beginning to become more distributed and mobile, while the nature and number of devices people use day-to-day changes rapidly. That will have an impact on the way companies operate, especially as they continue their move toward the cloud.

We covered Microsoft's comments on virtualization and cloud computing earlier this week. Microsoft says that virtualization isn't cloud computing, but that opens up a new question: Just what is there to cloud computing besides virtualization?

We had a few good comments on Scott Fulton's story, but decided to open up the question to a wider audience. You answered, and we culled the responses from Google Plus and Twitter, then pulled together your responses using Storify.

Remember when Amazon was just this online bookstore? The company has come a long, long way since then. One of the unexpected turns taken by Amazon is its foray into cloud computing. Though some might have been skeptical at the time, Amazon has not only succeeded with EC, but has scaled up the service by leaps and bounds and become the one to beat for hosted cloud services.

Amazon's Web hosting services suffered another outage this past weekend, this time in its European zone, thanks to power issues at a data center in Dublin, Ireland.

The outage, at first thought to have been caused by a lightning strike, may actually have been caused by a transformer failure, according to ESB Networks. Whatever happened, the data center's primary and secondary power sources were both knocked out, resulting in downtime for several Websites using Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. Apparently, power was lost to not only the data center's main power source, but also the backup generator, which is rare.