In Gartner’s global annual CIO survey of 1,600 IT leaders, cloud computing technologies shot up from the 16th slot to the No. 2 priority for CIOs. This is higher than web 2.0 technologies, networking, voice and data communications, business intelligence, security and data/document management.

Agility and flexibility are the main drivers of this shift in priorities. “These technologies, implemented properly, create the opportunity for IT to change its role, and the operational performance of the enterprise,” reads a Gartner presentation on the CIO survey findings. “Asymmetric technologies like virtualization, cloud and Web 2.0 enable companies to get out from under a front-loaded heavy investment model that limits IT’s agility and flexibility.

We’d like to hear from you. What are your company’s top priorities for 2010? How have they changed over the past several years? Let’s discuss.

Scheduled Data Export is a rarely talked about feature that may make you a data savior one day.

Data Export lets you prepare a copy of all your Salesforce data. You can generate backup files manually once every six days or schedule them to generate automatically at weekly or monthly intervals. When an export is ready for download you will receive an email containing a link that allows you to download the file(s).

Below are the directions to schedule a backup.

1) Click Setup | Data Management | Data Export and Export Now or Schedule Export. The Export Now option prepares your files for export immediately. This option is only available if a week has passed since your last export. The Schedule Export option allows you to schedule the export process for weekly or monthly intervals.

2) Select the desired encoding for your export file.

3) Select Include attachments… if you want your export data to include attachments.

4) Select Replace carriage returns with spaces if you want your export files to have spaces instead of carriage returns or line breaks. This may be useful if you plan to use your export files for importing or other integrations.

5) If you are scheduling your export, select the frequency, start and end dates, and time of day for your scheduled export.

6) Select the types of data to include in your export. If desired, you can include all data in your export file. We recommend that you include all data if you are not familiar with the terminology used for some of the types of data.

I’ve personally seen this feature save many companies time, money and embarrassment, so setup this free feature today.