Information technology’s next decade is looking increasingly cloudy – a forecast that could change the way people and organizations store, manage and access their information digitally.

The reason is the rise of “cloud computing.” A somewhat amorphous term, cloud computing refers to individuals and organizations linking to other computers and servers – usually via the Internet – to share information and computing capacity. The “cloud” metaphor represents those networked links, which are sometimes compared with electricity running through the grid from central power plants to individual users.

For consumers, the most familiar ways of accessing the cloud are checking e-mail on a service such as Google Inc.’s Gmail or uploading photos to a social-networking site such as Facebook. But businesses have also gotten into the act with services such as Salesforce.com Inc.’s popular browser-based, customer relationship-management software. Even the federal government now uses cloud services to spread the burden of its massive IT needs.

The benefits driving the shift to the cloud include cost savings and flexibility – a study by McKinsey & Company last year said it made particular sense for small and medium-sized companies – and the trend is backed by some of the biggest names in technology, including Google, Amazon.com Inc., VMware Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Cisco Systems Inc. and Oracle Corp. Even Microsoft, which derives the bulk of its revenue from desktop software, offers cloud services under its Windows Live brand.

Those firms and others see big money to be made. Research firm Gartner Inc. projects that the global market for cloud services will grow nearly threefold over the next few years, from $56.3 billion last year to $150.1 billion in 2013.

A number of local companies are among those offering cloud services. Providence-based BatchBlue Software LLC has found success with BatchBook, its Web-based, communications-management software, and other products for entrepreneurs and small businesses. In Ashaway, two-year-old GreenBytes Inc. is marketing its high-performance, energy-efficient, data-storage software to cloud companies, among others. WLNE-TV ABC 6 recently began using software from DataSphere Technologies Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., to create hyperlocal Web sites focused on individual cities and towns.