Stories by Christine Burns

Here are 10 companies and why they have a shot at challenging Amazon.

It is quite a stretch for most cloud service providers to match the geographical reach of Amazon Web Services.

A private Cloud looks and acts like a public Cloud, giving your corporation all the speed, agility and cost savings promised by Cloud technology, only it's single-tenant, and that tenant is you, right? Well, that's the goal, but it's not quite the reality yet for most enterprises.

According to Piston Cloud Computing's CTO, the rate at which his customer's pilot projects turn into production private clouds is pretty typical of most OpenStack-based providers – and it's pretty low.

OpenStack -- co-founded by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 -- certainly has the buzz, what with partnerships with AT&T, HP and IBM, to name a few, all of which have promised to use OpenStack as the base for their private cloud offerings.

New tools help IT execs cut Cloud costs, optimize resources, integrate and manage Cloud instances.

New tools help IT execs cut Cloud costs, optimise resources, integrate and manage Cloud instances.

The sky is the limit for both the number and the types of tools that will eventually help enterprise IT fully embrace the cloud, say industry analysts and cloud integration experts.

Cloud vendors are delivering boatloads of new tools to help enterprise IT build, buy, manage, monitor, tweak and track Cloud services. These tools are designed to help IT execs free up their budgets and their staff so both can be used towards more strategic, line of business projects.

Here are 12 security products that you can buy for your hybrid Cloud whether they run on premise, in the Cloud or a little of both.

Users and security consultants familiar with the process of securing hybrid clouds have one steady piece of advice to offer: the only way to go is one step at a time.

Securing a hybrid cloud is not the same thing as deploying hybrid security products.

Here are 10 predictions for what we’ll see happening in Cloud computing in 2013.

The time for dabbling in cloud computing is over, say industry analysts. 2013 is the year that companies need to implement a hybrid cloud strategy that puts select workloads in the public cloud and keeps others in-house.

IT professionals who have learned to work across traditional borders are the hot ticket in the current cloud-crazy job market.