Grazed from The Register.  Author: Matt Asay.

Hybrid clouds are all the rage in cloud computing today, with Gartner naming them "a major focus for 2012", even as hybrid clouds constitute fully 20 per cent of enterprise clouds today. But are they really anything more than a new face on private clouds? Marten Mickos, chief executive of private cloud company, Eucalyptus Systems, doesn’t think so.

As Mickos pointed out to me over email, private clouds don’t actually make sense unless they have a hybrid ability. Yes, he went on to say, there are and will always be some specific private clouds that are private and only private. But they are few and far between…

Grazed from CenterBeam.  Author: 

In growing the government’s cloud computing outreach, the National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to help businesses and agencies alike make their way into the technology, according to a post on Federal News Radio’s website.

Dawn Leaf, the NIST’s cloud computing executive program manger, said the agency’s new goal is to figure out how private sector efforts to help standardize the cloud can be converged with the federal effort. Leaf told the news source that the institute will look to revise the plans for cloud guidance over the next two months…

Grazed from Business Cloud9.  Author: Stuart Lauchlan.

Venture funding for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley remains buoyant and plentiful – once you get beyond a certain point and if you have the right idea in the Cloud.

The past few weeks have seen two US Cloud Computing start-ups – Marketo and Zuora – raising further rounds of funding that will be used in part to fuel their expansion into Europe. (Both announced their new funding while their CEOs were on visits to London.) Marketo, which set up its European HQ support centre in Dublin this year, has secured $50m in new venture financing, led by Battery Ventures…

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Grazed from CSO.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Legal complexities make it difficult to use public cloud computing, according to Raimund Genes, Trend Micro’s chief technology officer. Unless you’re a criminal, that is.

"Public cloud for me is not really a security challenge. It is a change in the way we operate with data. It doesn’t decrease security. It increases complexity, and that’s a problem," he told the company’s Canberra Cloud Security Conference yesterday.

"The cloud, from a legal point of view, will keep our internal lawyers and everybody else busy for the next fifty, one hundred years," he said.

Grazed from ITPro Portal.  Author.: Erica Thinesen.

Apple is reportedly on the look out for senior executives to run its cloud computing division as it tries to reinvent the way people store their data using its iCloud service.

Citing people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Apple is planning to hire senior level executives with strong backgrounds in web based software…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author:  Ian Truscott.

While there are many benefits to cloud computing, one group particularly well served by this technology are marketers. When it comes to engaging with audiences over the web, there are a number of attributes of cloud-based services that make them a natural fit for the technical marketers’ arsenal.

Marketing campaigns are very often short term, seasonal or opportunist. The ability to create something quickly and easily and then tear it down is key. Deploying to the cloud can provide an easy route versus attempting to grow a fixed IT asset…

Grazed from Formtek.  Author: Dick Weisinger.

The first waves of cloud computing have hit the shore and the impact has rattled many in IT.  Vendor strategies and business plans are hastily being rewritten as a result of the change.  But the implications of cloud computing appear far more reaching than just mid-course adjustments of corporate plans.   IT workers are expected to be strongly impacted by the cloud.

James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester Research, said that initially cloud computing could create new jobs.  The move to cloud applications may mean that there will be work in migrating data or integrating together new systems…

Grazed from The Carrier Cloud.  Author:  Neil Mcevoy.

Alcatel-Lucent has announced their Cloud strategy, targetting telcos to help them integrate their core WAN (Wide Area Network) services with data-centre Clouds and offer this combination as the essential mix needed for the enterprise market.

Their ‘CloudBand‘ product set is intended as a holistic platform that encompasses the network layer as well as the computing one.

As described in the accompanying white paper ‘The Carrier Cloud‘ Alcatel intend this platform to bring the faster-time-to-market benefits of virtualization to the full suite of network, CPE and application hardware that spans across their customers as well as their own IT estates, fundamentally enabling business model innovation…