The year’s popular posts in Enterprise Cloud show that people are still trying to wrap their heads around practical matters, such as which cloud services are best suited for their needs, as well as considerations of where IT is headed as it adapts to some of the changes that the cloud brings.

#1 Google Apps v. Office 365: Head-to-head comparison of features

Ian Hardenburgh compares the core features of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps to see which one comes out on top and includes a downloadable chart for at-a-glance comparison.

#2 11 cloud IaaS providers compared

Thoran Rodrigues does a thorough comparison of 11 IaaS cloud providers based on the same group of criteria. See how the major players fared in his scoring comparison.

#3 Will the cloud be the end of the IT department?

Thoran Rodrigues looks at the ways that the cloud is likely to change the nature of the IT department and the roles that it serves.

#4 Google Apps v. Office 365 summary: Which is better?

Ian Hardenburgh sums up his research on the Google Apps and Office 365 suites. He has a preference, but it still comes down to individual needs and your number of users.

#5 The five big myths of cloud computing

Thoran Rodrigues deconstructs the five biggest myths about cloud computing, driven by the cloud “hype” wave.

#6 Side-by-side comparisons of IaaS service providers

Thoran Rodrigues compares the major players and some of the newcomers in the increasingly competitive IaaS space, examining both their service offerings and how well they meet user cloud concerns.

# 7 Backing up and restoring snapshots on Amazon EC2 machines

Nick Hardiman describes several methods of backups of your Amazon EC2 machines. He also details the steps for restoring snapshot backups.

#8 Google Apps v. Office 365: Email and messaging

Ian Hardenburgh continues his in-depth comparison of Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 office suites. In this segment, he compares the email and messaging features of both.

#9 How to create a new AMI from a snapshot and launch a new VM

Nick Hardiman shows you the steps to taking a snapshot of your Amazon Machine Image and launching a new VM from it to build in redundancy for your service.

#10 Cloud app vs. web app: Understanding the differences

Are the terms cloud app and web app interchangeable? Not really, although they are very similar. Tajudeen Abubakr explains the difference.