The knock on Amazon Web Services and other IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers is that they’re not reliable enough for enterprise-class workloads. And even with recent price drops, it’s cheaper over the long haul to buy and run your own infrastructure.

I’m not going to attempt any in-depth cost comparisons since so much depends on the workloads in question and granular provider pricing for various sevices. But I’m pretty convinced that reliability concerns about cloud computing are going the way of cloud security worries: If you know what you’re doing, in most cases the public cloud is probably at parity or better with the risk posed by your own infrastructure (ultrahardened, mission-critical workloads excepted)…

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…