News

• Cloud computing pondered at eBay event

  Officials from companies such as HP and Joyent debated the merits and even the definition of cloud computing Monday during an event at eBay headquarters, emphasizing efforts underway and noting limitations to cloud computing on the software side.

• Cloud computing hype spurs confusion

  Competing definitions of the much-hyped concept of cloud computing are creating confusion in the IT industry, the analyst firm Gartner said in advance of its annual Symposium/ITxpo next month.

• IBM launches four new cloud computing centers

  IBM opened up cloud computing centers in four countries on Wednesday to let enterprises, universities and governments test Web-based services and applications.

• Oracle puts its 11g database in Amazon's cloud

  Oracle is now offering its 11g database, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager products through Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the vendor announced Monday at the start of its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

• Security challenges cloud virtualization payoff

  Virtualization and cloud computing will help companies accomplish more by breaking the physical bonds of an IT infrastructure and its users, executives from Cisco and Novell proclaimed this week during their keynote addresses at Interop New York. But caveats such as heightened security threats must be overcome in order to fully benefit from this new computing paradigm, they warned.

• Cloud computing takes hold despite privacy fears

  As consumers flock to the cloud computing world to store photos online, back up hard drives or use Web-based e-mail, many harbor worries about the security of that personal data, according to a study released late last week from the Pew Internet & American Life project.

• Cloud computing may draw government action

  Cloud computing will soon become an area of hot debate in Washington, D.C., with policy makers debating issues such as the privacy and security of data in the cloud, a panel of tech experts said Friday.

• Report: Cloud computing poised for enterprise adoption

  Gartner has named cloud computing, green IT and social-computing platforms among technologies that are poised to reach broad enterprise adoption in the next two to five years.