With news that Google and Microsoft plan to take on the Amazon Web Services monolith with infrastructure services of their own, you have to ask: How many clouds do we need?

This Google-Microsoft news broken this week by Derrick Harris,  proves to anyone who didn’t already realize it, that Amazon is the biggest cloud computing force (by far) and as such, wears a big fat target on its back. With the success of Amazon cloud services, which keep started out as plain vanilla infrastructure but have evolved to include workflow and storage gateways to enterprise data centers, Amazon’s got everyone — including big enterprise players like Microsoft, IBM and HP worried. Very worried…

Tremendously powerful new processors toiling away in the cloud could make it irrelevant what kind of screen you connect with, ushering in a new age of computing.

Early discussion of cloud computing focused on the public option. In fact, the economic concept of computing delivered as a sort of utility by mega service providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft was at the core of the original cloud-computing concept.

As it turns out though, these public clouds are hardly the only form that cloud computing has taken. Computing is more complicated than a true utility like electricity. For this and other reasons, private and hybrid clouds — which use computers and other IT resources controlled by a single organization — have evolved to become an important part of the landscape…

U.S. businesses looking to protect their data are turning to cloud computing as an answer to data loss, according to a survey conducted by CA Technologies. A large number of organizations identified data or application loss incidents over the past year. Thirty-six percent of businesses reported  storing data in the public cloud, and 76 percent reported utilizing a private cloud for storage.

The majority of businesses that store data in the cloud feel confident in the safety of that data. Eighty-four percent of U.S. and Canadian businesses storing their data in a private cloud feel their data is adequately protected, and 73 percent felt positively about data protection in the public cloud…

Leading service provider and technology integrator MicroTech has announced a new cloud computing solution the MicroTech Advanced Virtual Environment – an up-and-coming technology solution offering a high-performance, highly scalable, and readily available private cloud. This new solution from MicroTech will be introduced at EMC (News – Alert) World 2012, in Las Vegas from May 21-24.

 This new expansion from the service provider combines the impressive MicroTech MicroPodd portable data center with a CA (News – Alert) AppLogic turnkey cloud platform, monitoring solution, business intelligence reporting tool, and cloud minder identity management service to provide a comprehensive private cloud solution. Preconfigured in standard operating systems with templates for Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems, the MicroTech Advanced Virtual Environment features all the virtual characteristics and functions of a private cloud while also supporting all current standard cloud delivery models: IaaS, PaaS, SaaS (News – Alert)…

Vlad Shmunis, founder and CEO of the cloud communications company RingCentral, says new cloud-based phone technology lets customers take calls, listen to voice mail and send and receive faxes from anywhere.

What is cloud-based technology?

Cloud-based phone systems leverage the power of cloud computing to give customers the functionality of an expensive corporate private branch exchange, or PBX (telephone switching system). In plain English, cloud-based systems are hosted on off-site serversand are provided as a service. Because they don’t require customers to buy and maintain expensive telecommunications equipment, they’re much more affordable than conventional PBXs. In simple terms, this refers to any switchboard system, and because cloud-based phone technology exists on the Web, it can be accessed from anywhere — a desk phone, a cellphone or even a PC or tablet. Cloud-based phone service lets customers do almost anything on a phone inside and outside the office, enabling greater mobility and flexibility than conventional phone systems allow…

The days of Wyse Technology as an independent company are coming to a close as Dell formally prepares to acquire the company, and one of the more interesting cloud computing initiatives that Wyse has put in play has come to light.

In a move that could signal the future ambitions of Dell, Wyse Technology has launched a private beta of a new cloud computing service that not only provisions the thin clients that Wyse sells, but also mobile computing devices such as smartphones and tablet devices…

Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service offer us easy scaling of services. However, scaling is not as easy as it seems to be in the Cloud. If your software architecture isn’t done right, your services and applications might not scale as expected, even if you add new instances. As for most distributed systems, there are a couple of guidelines you should consider. I have summed up the ones I use most often for designing distributed systems.

Design for Failure
As Moore stated, everything that can fail, will fail. So it is very clear that a distributed system will fail at a certain time, even though cloud computing providers tell us that it is very unlikely. We had some outages [1][2] in the last year of some of the major platforms, and there might be even more of them. Therefore, your application should be able to deal with an outage of your cloud provider. This can be done with different techniques such as distributing an application in more than one availability zone (which should be done anyway). Netflix has a very interesting approach to steadily test their software for errors – they have employed an army of "Chaos Monkeys" [3]. Of course, they are not real monkeys. It is software that randomly takes down different Instances. Netflix produces errors on purpose to see how their system reacts and if it is still performing well. The question is not if there will be another outage; the question is when the next outage will be…

The next time you run into an IBM employee, ask them, “What can you do for me?” Their typical response: some flavor of, “Whatever you want.” This often brings some confusion in the small- and medium-size (SMB) market and the channel, but the truth is and has generally been that IBM can handle anything and everything when it comes to computing … and beyond.

When it comes to cloud computing IBM is making a big statement this week that the status quo remains. “Whatever you want,” seems to also apply to cloud computing.

The company revealed some stats and made some SmartCloud announcements that make a very strong statement about its cloud services…