The term “cloud computing” is everywhere these days. It’s not a new phenomenon, but rather it is continuing to evolve.

The simplest, nontechnical definition of cloud computing is using an Internet browser to access software applications over the Internet. People who use Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com or free email services are using a form of cloud computing.

The recent surge in popularity in cloud computing is driven by the fact that businesses do not need to make a large capital investment in servers or licensing fees. In other words, the future of computing becomes subscription-based, and not ownership-based…

Cloud services provider CA Technologies announced on Wednesday it has partnered with ECS Technology to promote cloud adoption in the commercial, retail, government, finance, insurance and manufacturing industries.

The companies will provide technical support for cloud adoption in China and help deliver Business Service Innovation by enabling new levels of speed, innovation, performance and cost/risk efficiencies.

This support will allow local firms to benefit from cloud computing and accelerate time to market with agile business services that deliver innovation, business value and competitive advantage…

Bidding for unused capacity on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform has become more competitive, causing periodic price spikes in the spot market Amazon has created. Prices for virtual machine deployments that normally cost less than a dollar an hour to have risen to $5 to $10 an hour, and sometimes even as high as $999 per hour.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says the price spikes are caused by periods of “constrained capacity” in particular availability zones and customer bidding strategies that employ above-market bids to prevent interruptions of their computing jobs. Amazon says these strategies result from confusion about how spot pricing works, and has posted a video outlining effective approaches to spot bidding…

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) wants to migrate its in-house telephony infrastructure to the cloud in yet another move supporting the federal government’s push to decrease costs and increase efficiencies through cloud computing.

The VA is seeking proposals for a voice-as-a-service (VaaS) system that will integrate with a unified communications system–including Internet chat, video, Internet voice, and traditional voice services–to replace its existing department-wide telephony service and reduce its overall communications footprint, according to a request for information (RFI) on FedBizOpps.gov…

The past couple of years has seen HP hard at work developing new services and solutions under its cloud computing division.

Last month, the company launched what is perhaps its strongest advancement in cloud solutions that work to better deploy its private, public and hybrid clouds.

The company has integrated its HP CloudSystem with Alcatel-Lucent to provide networking solutions for service providers, in addition to HP CloudAgile Service Provider program, HP CloudSystem Matrix 7.0, HP Cloud Protection program, and HP Enterprise Cloud Services–Compute…

Anyone paying attention to recent developments in cloud computing will understand just how much data is now being stored in private and public clouds around the world. This big data explosion means that companies of all sizes have access to an amount of data that was unthinkable just a few decades ago, but without the ability to perform complex business analytics, companies may just find themselves buried under all this information. Some recent moves by IBM show just how important analytics have become, especially in commerce, and how much they promise to transform the face of business for those who know how to harness them…

The Chief Information Officer (CIO) has always occupied a position secondary to the other C-suite executives like the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the Chief Operating Officer (COO) and the Chief Financial Officer (CFO). However, that is changing with the advent of cloud computing. So, what’s this new cloud-friendly CIO like?

According to a survey commissioned by CA Technologies and conducted by market research firm Vanson Bourne, cloud computing has shaken up the traditional role of the CIO. 615 CIOs in organizations with 500 or more employees in the telecoms, retail, financial and manufacturing sectors in the Asia-Pacific region responded to the survey, whose report titled “The Future Role of the CIO 2011” was released in Singapore…

Amazon’s new Elastic Network Interfaces should enable  companies to deploy workloads in Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud in a more flexible manner. As such, the technology helps move Amazon Web Services — built to provide inexpensive and fairly vanilla web-scale computing infrastructure – –  up the stack to enterprise-class computing,  experts said this week.

With Amazon VPCs, business customers can define and provision their own private section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud for their compute loads, selecting their own IP addresses, subnets, etc. Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs)  result from Amazon separating IP addresses and some of their associated attributes out from the underlying EC2 storage instances, according to an Amazon Web Services blog post. …