RightScale, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based cloud management software maker, has raised $25 million in new funds from Tenaya Capital, joined by DAG Ventures and other current investors: Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures. This is RightScale’s third round of funding, bringing the total funds raised to $42.5 million.

IT managers and budget decision-makers who took part in a survey said that, on average, 10.2 percent of spending on external IT services in 2010 will have gone to external cloud service providers, said Gartner in a statement on Wednesday. More than 1,500 people were interviewed for the survey.

While many companies are moving their apps and services to the cloud, roughly half are unaware of what they are getting themselves into, security-wise. That’s the main finding of Security of Cloud Computing Users, a recent study done by the Ponemon Institute for CA Technologies.

Adoption of cloud computing is spreading rapidly in the United States, primarily because it "allows companies to tap enormous computing power…without having to invest in the infrastructure," The New York TImes reports. According to Gartner, global sales of cloud services are expected to reach $102.1 billion by 2012. But Europe is only expected to account for approximately 29 percent of those sales.

Cloud computing is often portrayed as a panacea for dysfunctional IT systems. But the ugly truth is that cloud computing can create as many problems with IT infrastructure, systems management, security, application configuration and data access as it solves.

A survey of data center and IT management professional conducted by Zenoss, an Annapolis, Md.-based data center software and service provider reveals some surprising facts about virtualization and cloud computing. The results were collated from the responses of 204 individuals. Here are the the findings of the survey plus an info graphic outlining the State of the Cloud Computing:

Enterprise computing is moving to the cloud, but few seem to appreciate just how profoundly this shift will destabilize the traditional vendor landscape. Gartner projects enterprise software to top $232 billion in global revenue in 2010, and it’s safe to assume that the Oracle and IBM crowd expect the lion’s share to land in their pockets.

Not so fast. Lost in the hype around cloud computing is the very real possibility that the company doing so much to enable it just might take a massive share: Amazon.