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.

Following a no-cost test period, Microsoft on Feb. 1 will begin charging customers for its pay-per-use Windows Azure cloud services.

Microsoft unveiled Azure at its PDC conference in Oct. 2008, and since then it has been preparing the on-demand computing service for commercial availability. For the past month, Microsoft let customers use Azure for free in order to get experience with the service and a sense of how usage will translate into cost. On Feb. 1, the meter starts running.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/services/saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222600247

Microsoft wants to makes it easier for customers to deploy and manage applications that span both corporate data centers and Azure in so-called hybrid clouds. A major area of emphasis going forward will be on “server-service cohesion,”

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.”

Marketing has approached you with an interesting idea for an interactive gaming application that could go viral in a big way and draw hundreds of thousands of visitors—millions even—to your Website. The research for the game, dubbed Project X, is done, the numbers look good and everyone is excited about its potential.

Now it’s time to think about the costs, specifically the infrastructure required to launch such a campaign.

http://www.baselinemag.com/c/a/Infrastructure/Cloud-Computing-Infrastructure-819221/

How cloud computing can help IT managers overcome infrastructure hurdles like cost and hardware provisioning.

Software as a service and cloud computing have come together to create a confusing range of vendor offerings that are being billed as the next greatest thing. But as the area evolves it is bringing new opportunities for resellers as well as significant caveats. All of the major vendors are now in some way involved, so it is important to monitor developments closely.

Telecom’s integration arm Gen-i has been involved in cloud computing for years. “Our capabilities span all three types of cloud services,” says head of infrastructure and business applications, Leanne Buer. “These are Infrastructure (IaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Applications (SaaS). We also offer communications-based solutions (CaaS) as hosted services.

http://reseller.co.nz/reseller.nsf/feat/EB275872F7A3A4BDCC257653007D579D

As adoption grows beyond point applications, so does reseller opportunity.