Cloud failures cost $70m, CERN: EU laws slow adoption, Gartner's 10 IT trends. And more...

Cloud News

• Cloud failures may have cost upward of $70 million since 2007, according to this PCWorld article. The International Working Group on Cloud Resiliency (IWGCR) revealed that cloud outages of 13 well-known cloud services in the last five years resulted in an availability rate of 99.9% which is well below the expected reliability rate for mission-critical applications, which should be 99.999%.
• The Researchers at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva recently revealed that European data protection laws are hindering them from adopting cloud computing on a significant scale, according to this ComputerWorld article. CERN revealed that only a fraction of the data it collects from the Large Hadron Collider accelerator, which generates about a petabyte of raw data per second, is stored.
• Gartner released a list of the top 10 emerging infrastructure trends for 2012, according to this InfoWorld article. The list includes consumerization and the tablet, infinite data center, resource management, mobility and the personal cloud, hybrid clouds, fabric data centers, IT complexity, storage and big data, end of your service help desk and software-defined networks virtualizing the data center.
• Amazon EC2 suffered a major outage last week at their largest data center, which brought down some popular websites including Quora, Hipchat, and Heroku, according to this ZDNet blog. The outage was due to a power failure and subsequent generator failure.
• Eucalyptus announced updates to its cloud platform to add new features for rapid deployment and to remove the distinction between their open source and enterprise versions, according to this CloudPro article. The platform will now be fully open source and the source code will be available through Github.

Watch CloudViews Unplugged

Watch the June edition of CloudViews Unplugged - a monthly video blog analyzing the top cloud news stories.  

Featured Content on Cloud Commons

Gartner Report: Cloud Sourcing: Lessons Learned from Early Adopters

Cloud offerings continue to grow in maturity and volume. CIOs look at them as an alternative in their IT value chain. Gartner recently assesses organizations that purchased cloud-based service offerings. This report by Gartner (compliments of Cloud Commons® Ecosystem) shares some early lessons from their experiences.

Feature article

The Great Cloud Debate Rages On

By George Watt, CA Technologies

Cloud computing has been steadily, some might say "rapidly", gaining traction as a strategic business weapon. Every day brings new articles about businesses that have discovered how to leverage cloud computing to drive agility, take advantage of new opportunities, improve service, or lower costs. Lately there has even been an increase in the number of people who are touting cloud technologies as ways to improve security or business continuity; something very few would have said even a year ago. (Though some of us have been of that opinion for quite some time.)

To me this does not suggest that cloud computing is the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Rather, I believe it is a sign that business and technology leaders are beginning to figure out when cloud computing can help them - and when it cannot. Read the full article.

Cloud Views

• Is the cloud coming to an end? Join us as we discuss the future of cloud in our next Cloud Commons #CloudViews tweet chat. The event will take place on Friday, June 22^nd at 1:00 PM ET. You can find out more information about the tweet chat on Cloud Commons or for a preview of the questions, read this Cloud Commons blog.
• Will the Amazon EC2 outage impact cloud confidence? In this GigaOM blog, Barb Darrow discusses the recent outage and what it means for AWS and their customers.
• Is the cloud creating a ‘trickle-down' effect for all employees? In this ZDNet blog, Rachel King examines a recent report by GigaOM which details how the cloud is impacting employees and transforming companies.

MSP Corner

• Are subscription terms a thing of the past? In this MSPmentor blog, Joe Panettieri discusses the 12-month Windows Intune lock-in and how it may be a deal breaker for many MSPs.
• In today's market, SMBs often find themselves competing with larger organizations, but MSPs may be able to help level the playing field by offering enterprise-class services to SMBs, according to this MSPmentor blog.

Upcoming Cloud Events

• IEEE Cloud 2012: June 24 - 29, Honolulu, HI
• Cloud Identity Summit 2012: July 16 - 19, Vail, CO
• Cloud Computing World Forum: August 22 - 23, Sao Paulo, Brazil
• VMWorld 2012: August 26-30, San Francisco, CA

This Week in Cloud is a weekly newsletter published at the Cloud Commons site and available as a subscription to your inbox. If you are finding this newsletter valuable, you can register to receive it here.