• A majority of companies reported that they are adding new types of skills and roles to their IT departments to handle their growing cloud requirements, according to this Forbes article. The data comes from a recent CompTIA survey which revealed the current skills that are in demand include private cloud developers and administrators, cloud architects, departmental liaisons, integration specialists, and compliance specialists.
• VMWare has acquired Nicira, a privately held company known for its software defined networking technology for $1.26 billion, according to this TechCrunch article. Nicira's open-source software creates a layer of abstraction between servers and networking gear, and allows for virtualized pools of networking capability.
• Google announced a new Cloud Partner Program this week, according to this ReadWriteWeb article. The program will allow service providers to resell Google’s cloud offerings and provide higher levels of service and support than Google would be able to provide on its own. The program will also enable technology partners, such as Jaspersoft, to provide software to connect their existing and new tools to Google’s cloud.
• By 2016, 36 percent of all consumer data will be stored in the cloud, which compares to 7 percent in 2011, according to this Data Center Knowledge article. The article looks at recent predictions released by Gartner which shows a huge increase in consumer data moving to the cloud.

A 2011 Cloud Adoption study by BitNami, Cloud.com, and Zenoss of 500 IT professionals, found that one of the biggest inhibitors to cloud computing is a lack of training. ITprenuers and CA Technologies are now offering Cloud Essentials courses where students will gain a core understanding of how to adopt, operate and govern the cloud. Sign up for a Cloud Essentials Overview course or download the web-based version of the course.

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