By JENNA WORTHAM

How close are we to moving our lives entirely into the cloud?

I’m nearly there.

After losing one hard drive during a cross-country move and another after my cat knocked a cup of coffee onto my laptop, I’ve started shedding my digital baggage in favor of not having many personal e-belongings.

For starters, nearly all of my notes, contacts, writing projects in progress, to-do lists and personal reminders are saved on one Google App or another.

Business Intelligence is a multibillion-dollar market made up of enormous software projects from the likes of IBM/Cognos, SAP/Business Objects and Oracle/Hyperion — think high barriers to entry, long enterprise sales cycles and expensive software licensing. The recent $5.8 billion SAP/Sybase acquisition is just the latest evidence of the high stakes involved. But several cloud-based solutions are in the process of disrupting that market by, for example, making sophisticated BI accessible to general business users via monthly plans, and using web features to easily publish and share information company-wide.

Kicking things off with the proclamation “We’re betting the company on it,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer discussed his vision of cloud computing at the University of Washington this morning. He described a rapidly changing technology ecosystem in which the cloud is causing large shifts in server and storage technologies, as well as user behavior, and creating the necessity to although he emphasized that “the goal can’t be to throw out all the world’s software and start again.”

Microsoft is heading to the cloud. Are you?