In recent times, cloud computing has played a dominant role in the industry. Whether you feel positively or negatively about it, it is undeniable that cloud monitoring, like any other component in your network, needs to be monitored – perhaps more than any other. To more old-fashioned solutions for monitoring, the cloud creates a number of obstacles: you do not have ownership of its hardware, it is not run on your network and when problems or glitches occur you have no control over them.

Today there is a wide range of utilities to help you to manage your cloud computing, and the majority of these are able to respond to the disappearance of instances by starting up new ones with just a little direction from you. But how can this be integrated into your existing monitoring?…

The company says it is collaborating with Equinix "to become a one-stop shop for global enterprises that require best-of-breed data centre services…such as co-location, managed hosting and cloud computing services…Enterprise customers can expect a complete approach to service management with a single point of accountability for the company’s network and hosted computing infrastructure."

Nick Lambert, managing director, wholesale, mid-markets and global markets, at C&W Worldwide, said: "Equinix is the ideal company for us to collaborate with because its footprint of data centres closely aligns with our global network. Both companies share a complementary vision to deliver reliable, on-demand services that will enable some of the largest organisations to transit into a world-class cloud computing and communications environment."…

Keith Fafel entered the world of cloud computing during the summer of 2010, while he was working as a product manager with Rackspace, the San Antonio, Texas-based provider of hosted IT infrastructure services.

At the time, Fafel was working in Rackspace’s monitoring services line of business, which provides information on the performance of the hardware and software that Rackspace runs for its customers. Rackspace had begun developing cloud-based hosting services, and it was trying to create monitoring solutions for customers provisioning those cloud-based services so that they could be assured their servers and load balancers were working properly. Fafel says he "inserted" himself in the conversation Rackspace was having on how it would develop monitoring software for the cloud…

Wyse Technology, the global leader in cloud client computing, today announced that Daniel Barreto, General Manager for Wyse’s Mobile Cloud Business Unit, will moderate the closing keynote at APPNATION Enterprise Summit at the The Bently Reserve in San Francisco on Thursday, January 12th at 5:30pm. The keynote includes panelists from Appcelerator, Fifo, IBM, Samsung and SAP, and will discuss challenges and opportunities of mobile technologies in the enterprise.

APPNATION Enterprise Summit is an exciting new event developed to address the critical issues corporate CIOs and enterprise app developers face against an increasingly empowered and demanding enterprise workforce. In one information-packed day, the summit will address the risks, rewards, challenges and opportunities facing CIOs as they struggle to identify the right software, devices, systems and strategies and deliver results for their organizations…

Last week Oracle’s long-simmering Java infringement suit against Google, already postponed from Halloween, was scheduled to go to trial "on or after March 19."

On Thursday the court entered another order saying it won’t set a trial date any time soon and suggesting that given the demands on its calendar it could be 2013 before the case gets heard.

Presiding Judge William Alsup, who figures, speaking "from experience," that the trial will take two months, also said in his order that "The court will not set a trial date until Oracle adopts a proper damages methodology, even assuming a third try is allowed (or unless Oracle waives damages beyond those already allowed to go to the jury). For this ‘delay,’ Oracle has no one to blame but itself, given that twice now it has advanced improper methodologies obviously calculated to reach stratospheric numbers."…

nCircle, the leader in automated security and compliance auditing solutions, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The CSA is a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of best practices for security assurance within cloud computing as well as education on the uses of cloud computing to help secure all other forms of computing. Tim ‘TK’ Keanini, CTO for nCircle, will join CSA’s Corporate Member Advisory Council.

"nCircle has invested its top talent to the development of security standards and metrics over the last 12 years," noted nCircle CTO, Tim Keanini. "Meaningful security standards and metrics are crucial to multi-vendor interoperability, socializing the data across multiple disciplines and reducing security risk in public and private networks across the globe. We look forward to working with the CSA to define and educate the public about cloud security."…