According to Milind Govekar, an analyst at Gartner, cloud has rocketed up the list from number 16 to number two in Gartner’s annual CIO survey of key technology investments. “Like with anything new, the primary concern is security,” he says. In fact, the vast majority of clients who inquire about cloud, he says, would rather create a virtualized data center on their own premises—what some call a private cloud—because they’re uncomfortable with the security issues raised by cloud computing and the industry’s ability to address them.

http://www.csoonline.com/article/596819/cloud-security-the-basics

The Cloud Security Alliance and others are working to define security requirements for SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS cloud computing models.

ihotdesk reports that cloud computing is set to become increasingly popular in the coming years, with research firm IDC predicting that the innovation will become a common feature of more firms’ IT infrastructures.

http://www.rackspace.co.uk/rackspace-home/media-centre/news/article/article/cloud-computing-growing-six-times-faster-than-traditional-it/?tx_ttnews[backPid]=63&cHash=5e1860f3fe

Other research has supported the notion that cloud computing will be increasingly adopted over the coming years, with Mimecast informing IT support users that 62 per cent of firms are planning on rolling out cloud-based solutions in 2010.

There’s high-level support for cloud computing in the government space so, unsurprisingly, vendors are following the money. The latest to do so is Microsoft. The company this week rolled out a federal-specific version of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).  And you can bet Google and Amazon Web Services will be making some federal cloud moves as well. Here are some of the details and implications.

http://www.mspmentor.net/2010/02/26/microsoft-google-making-federal-cloud-moves/

While the cloud is subject to a good deal of hype these days, federal officials appear to take it seriously. We’ll see in the next few months whether more agencies adopt the cloud and which cloud competitors will nail down the business.

The government is putting in a lot of effort towards going IT savvy and making its services more useful for citizens equally in urban and rural areas. However, there are many key issues in making the citizen-centric services accessible in rural areas. For service providers it is difficult to reach them and scale up the functionality. For the Below Poverty Line (BPL) population community accessibility and affordability are major issues.

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20100222/technologysabha14.shtml

The basic tenet of the cloud deployment is multi-tenancy which implies a need for policy-driven enforcement, segmentation, isolation, governance, service levels, and chargeback/billing models for different consumer constituencies.

For Logiq³, the decision to go with a cloud-based provider of IT infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was a matter of cost and flexibility.

A start-up that began operations in 2006, the life reinsurance management firm could not afford to build and staff a data center from scratch, according to David Westgate, Logiq³’s vice president of technology. So Logiq³ instead chose cloud computing and managed IT services provider BlueLock to handle its data needs in the cloud.

http://howto.techworld.com/security/3211734/how-to-fix-cloud-security/

The five tips for effective cloud security

It’s like the history of enterprise computing, played out in months and years instead of decades.

Just give me my !%!%! apps, already!

Oracle arguably set this strategy in motion when it acquired its way to a complete infrastructure-plus-applications portfolio to lower customer acquisition costs and improve its competitive differentiation for CIOs. IBM and Microsoft also went that route, though to differing degrees and in different ways.

Cloud-computing platform vendors are going to have to do the same thing, except they don’t have the luxury of waiting.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10422861-16.html

Today’s cloud-computing vendors focus on infrastructure, but that won’t be the case for long. It can’t be. As competing vendors seek to differentiate themselves, they’re going to move “up the stack” into applications.

OWASP AppSec DC 2009 had a compelling session that defined cloud taxonomies and the security implications associated with the cloud computing.

The three taxonomies that have become part of our vernacular are

http://xml.sys-con.com/node/1231916

Defining cloud taxonomies and the security implications associated with the cloud computing

Analysts and journalists appear to be far more interested in and active about analytics in the cloud than those who build and deliver analytic applications and capabilities for business use. The hype seems to outpace the adoption rate. But hype in IT circles is often the predecessor to adoption. So maybe it is time to ask what’s going on here.

The signals from the vendor community are mixed. Many business intelligence (BI) solutions providers – some new and some long-time BI players – have entered into cloud computing including Teradata, IBM, Cloud9 Analytics, Cloudscale, In2Clouds, Vertica and others (more about this later). Yet Lucidera, an analytics-as-a-service pioneer, ceased operations in June of 2009 due to financial and funding challenges.

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/12100

Cloud computing is the popular and widely used term for virtualization of computing services. Cloud technology is all about services, and it fits into several categories:

On Wednesday, August 26, the All Points Blog reported on a poll (Take this week’s poll! in the daily newsletter) conducted by Directions Magazine: “Cloud computing is the latest ‘buzz word’ in information technology, but an understanding of what the phrase means remains elusive.” This was based on the results of the survey in which readers picked from a list of choices asking if cloud computing is just another way of describing Web services, SaaS, virtualization or remotely managed services. Readers had two other choices as well: “can’t be defined just yet” and “I don’t know what cloud computing is.”

Another choice should have been offered: “a bit of all the choices,” as cloud computing is not any one of the offered selections. We need a bit more background on cloud computing and what it will mean for the GIS industry because it appears that many of the survey participants, presumably all GIS savvy, did not know what cloud computing is. Yet that All Points Blog post also referenced an InformationWeek article which stated many IT managers are budgeting for cloud computing.

http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=3323

“based on the results of the survey in which readers picked from a list of choices asking if cloud computing is just another way of describing Web services, SaaS, virtualization or remotely managed services. Readers had two other choices as well: “can’t be defined just yet” and “I don’t know what cloud computing is.”

Two of Australia’s largest IT services companies – Fujitsu and Unisys – have outlined their belated plans to make cloud computing relevant to Australia’s largest organisations.

In events held one day apart in Sydney, the two organisations laid out their plans for taking the core applications of large companies and Government agencies to the cloud.

http://www.crn.com.au/News/159885,fujitsu-unisys-detail-cloud-computing-plays.aspx

Sleeping giants wake up to cloud computing potential