The cloud has been widely hailed as the way forward for businesses to manage their information technology requirements. No more will companies need to have on-premises servers requiring dedicated teams to keep things humming and support their users; no more lost business due to infrastructure being unable to cope with demand; no more lagging behind the software upgrade cycle. What’s not to like?Read more

A proposal to build a national federation of interconnected computing clouds in France, funded in part by government in order to protect the country's sovereignty, data privacy and local jobs, is gaining favor. Some fear that the idea, which is in part a backlash against American companies like Google, will spread to other parts of the Continent, potentially undermining the promised benefits to Europeans of  cloud computing.Read more

Rimon Law Group calls itself a Web 2.0 legal firm. It employs 28 senior lawyers in seven U.S. states but has no offices, thanks to cloud computing services from companies like RingCentral that are helping to change the face of businesses across the globe.Read more

People in more than 800 organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense, are already using CollabNet technology to allow geographically dispersed teams to work together in "the cloud" to develop and deploy better software faster. CollabNet, co-founded by open-source pioneers Bill Portelli and Apache Foundation leader Brian Behlendorf, is one of 26 companies named a 2010 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.Read more