As the IT services market inevitably heads towards the cloud services revolution CIOs must take steps to manage its risks and unexpected costs, Gartner warns. 

The analyst says the market will determine whether cloud-based outsourcing will either kill off traditional outsourcing,  lead to "as a service" products' convergence or result in outsourcing's next generation. 

Cloud computing is driving discontinuity-- resulting in both exciting opportunities and costly challenges. This calls for realistic cloud sourcing strategy development and contracts Read more...

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) partners with ISO for key cloud security standard development. 

It will have a key role in this development under ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission), with whom it has a Category C liaison relationship (a Category C liaison being organisations making a technical contribution in the working groups under Sub Committee 27).

The CSA and SC 27 will start working on 2 project-- a new work item proposal for cloud security (providing guidelines on cloud service Read more...

Lenovo announces what it says is the first enterprise-class Cloud Ready Client (CRC)-- a development with Intel to optimise the PC experience while reducing drag on data centers. 

The CRC takes is supposed to take note of what devices have access to the cloud, and take advantage of more powerful hardware (unlike regular cloud applications playing to the lowest common denominator). 

However it will only be available for Sandy Bridge-enabled devices. 

A second Lenovo announcement is its Secure Cloud Access (SCA), an application allowing business organisations Read more...

Logicalis launches its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Cloud Hosting Programme, allowing ISVs access to its cloud platforms, as well as support in their migration efforts. 

The company's hosting platform supports most operating systems, including all major hypervisors, Windows, Linux and Unix platforms. 

Logicalis says its cloud hosting platform also supports hybrid operating systems and applications, with Oracle, Windows and VMWare residing together in the same hosted environment. 

The ISV market is one of the UK's bigger technology sectors, where Read more...