The big freeze gripping the UK has exposed how many firms, particularly small organisations, are ill-equipped to deal with the staff absences such disruption causes.

According to the Federation of Small Businesses, 10% of the 30 million workforce was unable to work on Tuesday, costing £600m. Figures from the Business Continuity Institute estimate that only a third of UK firms have plans in place to cope with staff absences, so the cost to the UK economy looks certain to carry on rising throughout the bad weather.

http://www.cbronline.com/news/uk_ill_prepared_for_the_big_freeze_281009

Small firms particularly disrupted

You want to make an enterprise case for cloud computing? Maybe you should consider the new Monterey initiative from Cloudsoft, Prima Cloud, Intel, Citrix and Super Micro.

While there’s plenty of excitement about the prospects of cloud computing, there remains just as much skepticism in the marketplace, especially within enterprises skittish about putting highly distributed mission-critical applications outside of their own domain.

http://www.channelinsider.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Test-Driving-Cloud-Computing-140413/

Where do you sit on the cloud computing continuum?

Lowering operating costs has always been among the top priorities of today’s enterprises, and cloud  computing may be what they need to achieve that.

This technology has been around for years, but its role today has increased tremendously since it is used not just to provide software  as a service, but infrastructure and platform as a service as well.

http://www.sci-tech-today.com/news/The-Cost-Appeal-of-Cloud-Computing/story.xhtml?story_id=10000B5ZP4DC

To help enterprises adopt cloud computing, Citrix has come up with the C3 product family.

Citrix and Xen.org are planning to roll out a strategy for a open-source cloud computing platform based on the Xen virtualization hypervisor. The announcement will come on the first day of VMware’s VMworld show. The Xen Cloud Platform will compete directly with VMware’s vCloud offering, and will run competing virtualization technologies from such vendors as VMware and Microsoft.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Citrix-to-Take-on-VMware-in-the-Cloud-348217/

Citrix Systems and Xen.org are going to use the first day of VMware’s VMworld 2009 show to announce a plan to take on the virtualization giant in the cloud.