Cloud adoption amongst enterprises is now expected to significantly grow throughout the rest of 2012, however it has also been revealed that some serious obstacles must be overcome. This is according to a customer survey carried out by Cisco Systems.

The 2012 Cisco Global Cloud Networking Survey of 100 IT executives in each of 13 countries has unveiled that while just 5% of the IT executives are currently using cloud computing technology, in order to deliver the majority of the software applications they are using within their business, the figure is expected to rise to around 20% by the end of the year, thus quadrupling the amount of enterprises using cloud hosting as a solution.

Inbar Lasser-Raab, Senior Marketing Director of the Cisco Services Routing Technology Group (SRTG) has been explaining: “The reason so many are moving the majority of their apps to the cloud is because there are more …

Patrick Houston — VCs devoted $6.9 billion in 2011 to “Internet-specific” startups, a proxy term for “cloud” because that’s what most of them are doing, according to Steve Bengston, a director of a startups practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. That’s up 68% from last year.

In Q4 alone, cloud-related investments of $1.8 billion outdistanced the dollars that went into biotech ($1.3 billion), cleantech ($883 million,) and medical devices ($498 million.)

It’s not just the amount. It’s the number of deals, too. During all of 2011, VCs funded 1,004 software startups that were mostly in the cloud–or more than double the 446 biotech companies that received dough.

Not all those companies will survive to deliver a product one day, of course. A large number of startups makes the chance of success more likely.

Remember, VCs have a clear imperative to find the money. But it …

Two of the biggest stars in business collaboration software in the last few years have been Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint Server respectively. However, running these in-house can suck up 70% of your IT department’s time and help contribute to server sprawl as you attempt to keep legacy servers and software up to date. Consider using a ‘blackbox’ approach to running your IT infrastructure through managed hosting services.   Here are the top five benefits of adopting this approach.

Pure Infrastructure

Very few hosting providers can offer pure Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).  Virtual Internet goes beyond this providing blended dedicated and cloud servers to match your business profile.

Orchestrate and innovate

Seal IT complexity inside a VI black box that allows you to orchestrate all your IT assets under centralized dashboards supported by engineers on call 24/7/365.  Further opportunities exist to innovate your systems including automating security, disaster recovery and server …

Lately some have been suggesting that the internet is at risk. Much if not all of the hoopla stems from a recent interview with Sergey Brin from Google (GOOG). Brin says the biggest threats come from government crackdowns, attempts to control piracy, and “the rise of ‘restrictive’ walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.”

If you look at the arguments, they essentially break down to “If Google can’t spy on your every behavior, then the internet will collapse.” This is because all information in applications that aren’t web-based can’t be crawled by web crawlers, and user behavior inside the application also cannot be monitored.

It sounds pretty ridiculous, when you think about it. People have been using applications for years on the desktop. Some of them are local to the desktop …

Recently Google announced a significant price increase for use of its App Engine Platform-as-a-Service. The increase itself was not a huge surprise. Google had been making noises that something like this was in the offing for a number of months. But the size of the increase shocked the Web development and cloud applications community. For most users, the cost of using the Google runtime environment effectively increased by 100% or more.

A huge online backlash ensued. For its part, Google put off the increase by a month and moderated some of the increases. But the whole incident brought many nagging doubts about the cloud to the surface. Said one poster on one of the many threads that lit up the Google Groups forums after the increase:

“I like so many of us have spent a lot of time learning app engine – I have been worried like so many that using …

Terrafugia, the $279,000 airplane that drives and parks like a car, was the toast of the recent New York Auto Show. But that is quite the overhead and a long future before mass acceptance. Today we have a new reality in cloud innovation that pertains to safe driving, Japanese governance, and time-stamping data.

We’re talking about a black box for cars.

Anybody who is considering a move to the Cloud knows that the greatest economic motivation for Cloud Computing is the pay-as-you-go, pay-for-what-you-need utility computing benefit, right? Deal with spikes in demand much more cost-effectively, the public Cloud service providers gush, since we can spread the load over many customers and pass the savings from our economies of scale on to you. The utility benefit is also a central premise of Private Clouds. Build a Private Cloud for your enterprise, the vendors promise, and you can achieve the same economies of scale as Public Clouds without all that risk.

Unfortunately, what sounds too good to be true usually is. There are a number of gotchas on both the Public and Private Cloud provider sides that limit—or even prevent—organizations from obtaining a full measure of the utility benefit. Let’s go back to economics class and take a closer look …

A recent special report on cloud computing in iWeek outlined some of the key challenges and benefits attached to cloud computing. They are worth reviewing as they give an ‘unclouded’ view of virtualization technologies which are reshaping the way web hosting companies deliver IT resources to SMEs and SMBS over the Internet.

Generally, a company with a legacy IT department needs to carefully consider which cloud services to launch first, before undertaking a complete migration. There are issues with cost, timing and management structures.

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