The two indispensable enablers of this change have been:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/04/significant/38760/

The nested, or hierarchical, label system is one more step toward Gmail’s being a main base of one’s computing life, a la Outlook of yesteryear for me. More later, but that’s the news for now.

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

It seems that IT leaders are warming up to cloud computing, with its promise of elasticity, utility-based billing, multiple storage locations, and the ability to pull data directly from storage devices. In fact, cloud computing ranked second (behind virtualization) as the technology most beta-tested in 2009, according to Computerworld’s 2010 Forecast survey of more than 300 IT executives.

But does that mean cloud computing is destined for success? Not so fast, said nearly half of the IT executives polled. They said they are unlikely to try cloud computing this year and ranked it as the No. 1 overhyped and underdelivering technology. What’s behind this love-hate relationship? We asked people on both sides of the debate.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/345488/Cloud_computing_Love_it_or_hate_it_?taxonomyId=12

Is cloud computing the next best thing in IT, or is it overhyped and underdelivering? Here’s what both sides of the debate have to say.

Now that you’re finally backing up your computer to protect yourself from data disasters, here’s another doomsday scenario to populate your nightmares.

Let’s imagine you’re using one of any number of popular web-based services for blogging, sharing photos, writing documents or communicating with friends.

Perhaps you store all of your photos at Flickr, labeling them with captions and tags.

http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2009/12/even_with_cloud_computing_serv.html

I’m gradually moving toward using “cloud” services for everything from spreadsheets to e-mail. Think of all the things that can go wrong with your own computer. Theft. Fire. Your own stupid mistakes. I tend to think a company like Google might do a better job than I would at keeping my data safe.

Google’s latest brainchild, Google Wave, is all the rage among bleeding-edge technology enthusiasts. But corporate information technology executives say that while they’re intrigued by Wave – a replacement for e-mail, the most widely used of all Internet services – they’re not ready to adopt it.

Part of the reason is a reluctance to entrust important data to someone else’s servers, even those of giant Google. But another factor is old-fashioned resistance to change.

http://www.thenewstribune.com/business/story/955443.html

google: Reluctance to change might stall e-mail replacement

Can cloud computing live up to its hype, or is it just another empty promise designed to create demand and liberate more funds from already strapped IT budgets?

“Hype aside, cloud computing is nothing new,” according to Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned security technologist and author of numerous books on the subject. “It’s the modern version of the timesharing model from the 1960s, which was eventually killed by the rise of the personal computer. It’s what Hotmail and Gmail have been doing all these years, and it’s social networking sites, remote backup companies, and remote e-mail filtering companies such as MessageLabs. Any IT outsourcing–network infrastructure, security monitoring, remote hosting–is a form of cloud computing.”

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2009/11/12/is-cloud-computing-a-credible-solution-for-education.aspx

Can cloud computing live up to its hype, or is it just another empty promise designed to create demand and liberate more funds from already strapped IT budgets?

In a suburb outside Chicago, Microsoft has been showing off its latest data center. The 707,000-square-foot building will hold, at top strength, 162 sealed cargo containers of up to 2,500 computer servers each, plus thousands more servers in conventional racks. The cost: $500 million. But though Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system is capturing all the attention these days, this bland building might be a place to see the company’s future.

All the computers will run on a single operating system called Azure that, eventually, will let big companies run applications like e-mail and house data at this and other Microsoft ( MSFT – news – people ) centers. Azure is the company’s main play in the biggest contest in technology, called cloud computing, wherein data storage and computation take place many miles from customers’ desks. The idea is to cut the cost of the labor, the hardware and the energy that go into data processing, and to make files accessible to workers who move around a lot. Proponents promise cost reductions between 30% to 90%. At the Chicago center only three Microsoft employees and a few contractors can run over 400,000 servers catering to more than 670 million e-mail and instant messaging accounts and drawing 60 megawatts of electricity

http://news.alibaba.com/article/detail/technology/100192439-1-microsoft%2527s-new-cloud-computing.html

Outsiders are wary of the Azure swagger. “You don’t see a lot of businesses now with spare technicians to migrate their software over [to the cloud],” says Michelle Bailey of analyst firm IDC. “Anything with real business value won’t be on the cloud for years.” She figures this business needs ten years to kick in, maybe less in developing nations with looser laws

Internet search giant Google beat out rival Microsoft  in a bid to provide e-mail services to all Los Angeles, Calif., government workers. The contract is expected to increase support  for Google’s cloud -computing  services.

Under the $7.5 million contract approved by L.A.’s City Council on Tuesday, Google will provide both e-mail services and on-demand applications to the city’s 30,000 municipal and state workers. While the size of the deal isn’t significant for Google, the win over Microsoft and support for its cloud-computing services is.

http://www.toptechnews.com/news/L-A–Cloud-Contract-Goes-To-Google/story.xhtml?story_id=130004HEAQ6I&full_skip=1

Los Angeles has awarded a $7.5 million contract for cloud-computing services to Google, which beat out Microsoft. Despite protests, the L.A. City Council accepted Google’s bid with incentives to avoid security breaches. Both Google and Microsoft have had problems securing cloud data, and the L.A. contract puts the spotlight back on cloud security.

A consumer advocacy group that is opposed to a plan by the city of Los Angeles to adopt Google’s hosted e-mail and office applications is accusing the company of a double standard on security issues.

In a letter to Bernard Parks, chairman of the Los Angeles City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee, Consumer Watchdog claimed that Google was being hypocritical in marketing Google Apps to the city.

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=57A87450-1A64-67EA-E4EA28B471DA2E5E

A consumer advocacy group that is opposed to a plan by the city of Los Angeles to adopt Google’s hosted e-mail and office applications is accusing the company of a double standard on security issues.

I am running a whole environment at home to experience our technology. However, up to now it was all “on premise”, no Cloud integration. This has to change. Therefore I was more than happy to join our internal  Hosted Exchange 14 beta program. We are offering the hosted Exchange program to Live@Edu – but we can use it for Friends and Families as well – which I wanted to do. There were a few requirements I had:

http://ceektechnology.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!8CD57C61CF045192!1930.entry

Repost for those who did not see it the first time.