Corporate cloud showdown: IT vs. Legal
Increasingly, IT and legal find themselves facing off over the benefits and risks of cloud computing. Here's how some entities have hammered out a compromise.Insider (registration required)

Public-sector cloud computing: The good, the bad and the ugly
From California and Utah to Ohio, Massachusetts and Maine, state and local governments are using the cloud to update antiquated systems, but the hurdles are high.

Power your mobile strategy with a cloud
Using a private cloud to handle back-end infrastructure tasks for your mobile workforce is the way to go. To get there, be prepared to make an investment of time and resources.

E-discovery in the cloud? Not so easy
Companies often assume data in the cloud is inherently discoverable, but is it? Know what questions to ask your cloud vendor so you can get your data back when required.

Life with a large cloud: Lessons learned
IT leaders who already manage large clouds have advice for those just getting started. Here's one of the most important tips: Don't forget the training and personnel issues.

Five Reasons to Host Your Own Email
Email is still an important means of communication in business. In recent years, an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their email to web-based services like Google Apps for Business. In a tight economic time, the money saved by moving to the cloud can be hard to ignore. There are trade-offs though. Today, for instance, iCloud email users in Germany found that push-email features were disabled due to a patent lawsuit by Motorola. Here are five things to keep in mind when considering outsourcing your businesses email.

CA offers new disaster recovery option
CA Technologies has launched a disaster-recovery software-as-a-service offering that combines on-site data protection with a cloud-based service, using Microsoft Azure's infrastructure.

Cloud computing in 2012: An InfoWorld special report
InfoWorld's experts keep you up to date on the realities of deploying the cloud in the enterprise

Cloud Workshop Focuses on Rediscovering the User
In shop class, they tell you to measure twice and saw once. IT isn't so different. BMC's cloud workshop offers an object lesson in why it pay offs to bring the vendor, IT and the end user together before a new project is designed and deployed. A little communication can save time and money -- and maybe even your job.

Amazon cloud service automates business processes
Amazon's newest offering, announced Wednesday, is designed to ease application development and automate business processes.

Ranking 24 Nations by Cloud Policy
The Business Software Alliance surveyed 24 countries that comprise lion's share of global information and communication technologies market to identify the most cloud-friendly policy environments. Where does the U.S. rank?

Microsoft to tightly integrate Windows 8 and SkyDrive
Microsoft will extend SkyDrive from being an online file storage service into what the company calls "a device cloud" that is closely integrated with Windows 8, the next version of the company's OS.

Is Your Cloud Project Ready to be Agile?
Agile development and the cloud are like hand in glove. But Agile can be dangerous if your organization isn't ready for it. Here are some questions you need to consider to determine if your IT organization is seriously ready to implement Agile.

An agile IT architecture in three easy steps
Columnist Michael Hugos describes how to build an agile IT architecture in three easy steps, from integrating internal and external systems to developing customer-facing applications. Insider, registration required.

Security in the Cloud Is All About Visibility and Control
When it comes to security in the cloud, organizations are confident in their cloud providers, but also and reluctant to expose certain types of data and applications, according to IT industry association CompTIA. Security vendors maintain the problem is one of visibility and control, and each has a solution.

How to Break Down the OpEx vs. CapEx Cloud Computing Debate
Cloud computing is too often reductively branded as an economic calculus that would trade a CapEx model for an OpEx model. But it's a little more complicated than that. Bernard Golden explains what we talk about when we talk about cloud computing.

TechAmerica Foundation: Governments need to get into the cloud
The cloud is being pitched as the best way to do more with less, but government agencies are slow to modernize, California official stresses

Roche to move 90,000 employees to Google Apps
Health care and pharmaceutical company Roche Group will standardize its email and calendaring system on Google Apps for about 90,000 employees worldwide, the companies announced on Thursday.

Government Moves Toward Cloud Computing 'Perfect Storm'
As FedRAMP initiative ramps up, cloud service providers can look forward to clearer guidance from federal clients and a robust market as administration tech chiefs press on toward a 'Perfect Storm' in cloud computing.

Apache embraces cloud with Deltacloud approval
Extending its range of open-source projects to cloud computing, the Apache Software Foundation has approved the Deltacloud as a top-level project, the organization announced Thursday.

In the cloud, a data breach is only as bad as your contract
Use your contract to protect your company's interests before a breach occurs.

Rackspace soon to partner with developers of private OpenStack distros
Rackspace expects to soon announce commercial private OpenStack distributions that it will support as part of its Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition set of services.

Zynga makes dramatic shift from public cloud
Zynga has moved most of its users away from Amazon Web Services and onto its private cloud in a move to maximize the reliability and performance of its social games network.

EMC and VMware team with Atos to create European cloud company Canopy
EMC and VMware are teaming with French IT services company Atos to create a European cloud infrastructure provider, Canopy, the companies announced Wednesday.

Moves to the Cloud Can Spark Turf Wars
The decision to migrate company information-technology functions to the cloud or elsewhere is usually broken down as a set of specific cost-benefit calculations. However complicated the weighing of the startup savings and the longer-term returns involved in outsourcing IT, it at least appears to be a rational process.

Citrix simplifies cloud service management
Citrix is shipping a new version of its cloud management software CloudStack that makes it simpler for service providers and large businesses to manage and provision cloud services.

UptimeCloud shows real-time AWS costs
Uptime Software is the latest company aiming to help eliminate bill shock for cloud users.

Cloudscaling to offer OpenStack private cloud platform
Cloudscaling plans to introduce on Monday an OpenStack-based platform that enterprises can use to build private clouds.

Why one insurance company ditched its own hardware- for a cloud -based SAN
Why do some enterprise managers decide to brave their way into the new and unknown of cloud-based services? Sometimes it's simply because the old technology just isn't working out that well anymore.

FBI declares cloud vendors must meet CJIS security rules
The FBI Tuesday reaffirmed its rule that all cloud products sold to to U.S. law enforcement agencies must comply with the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Systems security requirements.

HP moves load testing software to the cloud
With the release of its new LoadRunner in the Cloud application load testing solution, HP aims to provide the flexibility of software-as-a-service in tools that traditionally entailed substantial investments to implement.

Red Hat launches storage appliance for Amazon's cloud
Red Hat has announced the Virtual Storage Appliance for Amazon Web Services (AWS), which can take advantage of Amazon's cloud while at the same time offering excellent performance, the company said on Tuesday.

Amazon Web Services lowers price of storage in its cloud
Amazon Web Services has cut the cost of storing data using its Simple Storage Service (S3) -- saving users with 50 TB stored on the service around 12 percent on their monthly bill, the company said on Monday.

Armored-truck company entrusts tracking software to Windows Azure cloud
U.K.-based cash-transport firm G4S is trusting the security of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service to keep safe the application that tracks where the money is as it travels to and from customers and the company's vaults in armored trucks.

Cloudyn monitors and optimizes AWS usage
Cloudyn is launching a hosted service on Monday that aims to monitor a company's cloud usage and recommend ways to optimize that usage in order to cut costs.

Alfresco 4.0 heads for the cloud
In anticipation of offering its open-source content management software as a service, Alfresco has upgraded its namesake product to work with multiple clients and to interact with a wider range of form factors, the company announced Thursday.

Is the Cloud Really Cheaper?
That there is growing company demand for cloud or software-as-a-service solutions should come as no surprise.

HP extends asset mapping into Amazon, VMware clouds
Hewlett-Packard has updated its Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA) software package so it will allow administrators to map their IT assets in the cloud.

Microsoft partner: Office 365 app dev model to change, expand
External developers will be able to build much more sophisticated applications and tools for Office 365 once Microsoft releases the next upgrade of that cloud-hosted communication and collaboration suite, according to a Microsoft partner.

CloudPassage launches new security product for public clouds
CloudPassage is launching a new security product for virtual servers in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services that it says takes care of the all-important need for security when using services from infrastructure providers.

How to Document Cloud Design Decisions
When developing and integrating cloud systems, the public interfaces and external "contracts" among services mean that design and architecture can evolve rapidly and in parallel. But when they do and the teams are not in the same room, this speed is an invitation to chaos. As two teams work on opposite sides of an interface (the service provider and the service consumer), it's easy for the teams' definition of variables and methods to fall out of sync. Of course the service provider team could update its document and notify the other team about a new semantic of a field value or behavior of a service. But the reality is too often that they don't, and the classic problem of distributed version control rears its ugly head.

Amazon Web Services moves backups to cloud with new appliance
Amazon Web Services has launched a public beta test of AWS Storage Gateway, which allows enterprises to back up application data in Amazon's cloud using a software appliance, the company said on Tuesday.

Former NASA OpenStack researchers enter private cloud market with Piston Enterprise OS
Piston Cloud Computing co-founder Josh McKenty has laid out the same objective on several occasions, from speaking to attendees at the inaugural OpenStack design summit to addressing friends and colleagues at his company's launch party: "Let's finish where we started."