CA aquired cloud startup 3Tera in a move that is not characteristic of the company. For one thing, it reportedly paid a lot of money for a 20-employee firm, somewhere around $90 million, and CA rarely pays a premium. To Chris O'Malley, executive VP, the purchase is emblematic of a new day at CA.

Yesterday RSA announced new controls for virtual infrastructure security in cloud environments. Concerns regarding security and compliance have been primary factors preventing large enterprises from placing production workloads on shared virtual infrastructure in the cloud. Yesterday?s announcement and proof-of-concept didn't solve all of public cloud?s security woes, but it brought us closer to a practical solution....

Have you noticed that when vendors talk about the cloud, the conversation often revolves around their own product or service? You may come to believe that the ?cloud? is defined by a specific set of equipment and software....

Carpathia Hosting and Citrix Systems have combined resources to offer a XenServer-based set of cloud services, called Carpathia InstantOn. ...

In two weeks, I'll be in Santa Clara at the industry's newest event, Cloud Connect. I'm chairing a track focused on Cloudonomics, a term I coined a couple of years ago to connote the complex economics of using cloud infrastructure, platform, and software services. There are a number of great technical tracks planned, but mine is focused on what I consider to be the most important question: "Why do cloud?" ...

The speaker lineup at this year's annual RSA Security Conference and Expo, underway this week in San Francisco, is packing some serious federal heat.

The Cisco guys do a killer job on these tight, concise TechWise TV episodes… The one this Thursday is on Vblocks.  Hari is the main man in the VCE solutions squad in Santa Clara, and Vblock builder – a great resource to listen to, talk to and get to know. You can register here: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/ns340/ns339/ns638/ns914/html_TWTV/t...

Cloud computing will alter IT operations and costs, these changes mean that two very strong friction points for applications -- resource provisioning and funding -- will dwindle. What does this mean for applications? CIO.com's Bernard Golden explains.

A startup that moves VMware-based applications to the Amazon cloud and creates a secure tunnel between a customer's data center and the cloud service is launching a public beta trial Monday. CloudSwitch, recently out of stealth mode, moves existing applications from internal data centers to the cloud without rewriting the app or requiring changes in management tools.

Bad pun, but true. I originally talked about this in this post. Actually, the encryption itself is straightforward. It’s the management of keys that has to be done correctly. Hard ? Yes. Impossible? No. Will market forces provide workable solutions? Yes. The dollars in play are too great.