While the benefits and value of the federal cloud computing policy can be debated, the world’s transition to cloud computing as an integral component of any IT infrastructure cannot be denied.

...The ramifications of this new normal programming world are twofold. First, the emerging cloud environments will be forced to follow suit and become language-independent. This will be a critical development to increasing cloud adoption, improving security and improving cloud interoperability.

Topics covered in this article: - Cloud buyers and suppliers on their first date - Cultural shift for public sector IT- Demand for common standards- Risk aversion and opportunity cost- Cloud security concerns go unaddressed

Despite the myriad benefits of cloud computing solutions, several challenges still exist. Being a young industry, there are few tools, procedures or standard data formats or service interfaces in place to guarantee data, computer application and service portability. As evidenced with the recent situation involving the services failure of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, outages can be a potential risk—and can have widespread implications for consumers of cloud services. This risk becomes even more severe if a mission-critical environment could be impacted.

Cloud computing is a new approach in the provisioning and consumption of information technology (IT). While technology is a crucial component, the real value of cloud computing lies in its ability to enable new capabilities or in the execution of current capabilities in more efficient and effective ways. Although the current hype around cloud computing has focused on expected cost savings, the true value is really found in the mission and business enhancements these techniques can provide. When properly deployed, the cloud computing model provides greatly enhanced mission and business capability without a commensurate increase in resource (time, people or money) expenditures.

Amazon's cloud business just took a sharp right turn toward private cloud this week, which foreshadows good and bad things for enterprise IT. The cloud giant said it has built a special region of its cloud dedicated to the U.S. government, called AWS GovCloud.

Undoubtedly the most used marketing phrases in the last year have involved cloud computing as a valuable feature of various software and services for sale. Some see this trend as “evolutionary” for IT, a natural next-step following the widespread adoption of virtualization and the profusion of high-speed bandwidth. Others view cloud computing as another word for host-based computing, in effect, a return full-circle to the fifty-year old model of input/output (I/O) devices connected to a shared mainframe. But this time, we have a wide variety of useful, even fun I/O devices like smartphones and tablets, and the connection to the shared cloud is wireless and fast!

In June of 2011, David Linthicum presented a session entitled, "Handling data integration challenges in the cloud," and participated in the expert panel discussion, "What can go wrong in the cloud?" at the SearchSOA virtual event "SOA in Action, Navigating SOA, Integration and the Cloud." The main question from the panel discussion was – as the title suggests – about problems that enterprise organizations run into as they implement new cloud technologies as a part of their IT architecture. In this SOA in Action recap David Linthicum responds to SearchSOA.com Site Editor Jack Vaughan's question about where cloud computing implementations fail to contribute to the greater enterprise architecture.

As cloud computing technologies evolve, early adopters in enterprises are learning that one size doesn't fit all. Services like AWS showed the way. Amazon could deliver more computing with less people and infrastructure and make money; a simple business proposition, right? But for large companies, the reality is not so clear. After all, IT in the enterprise usually isn't the end product.

This column is about two vendors (No, no, keep reading! It gets good, I promise) that turned their IT infrastructure on its ear and built out private clouds. Yes, vendors have IT shops too, they need all the same stuff you do while they're picking your pocket, like email servers, app servers, ERP and what have you.