The U.S. Army will discuss plans for integrating cloud computing into its enterprise architecture and broader IT transformation, during an InformationWeek Government Webcast on Weds., June 23. It's a unique opportunity to hear one of the world's largest IT user organizations share its strategy for the emerging cloud model.

I'm at the Structure 2010 conference, where panelists on the "Cloudonomics: Economics of the Cloud" session were focused on what they are seeing happening in the cloud, from their customers' perspectives.

The recently released beta of Firefox 4 shows off some new features and boosted HTML 5 support. But the biggest surprise is how much the redesigned Firefox interface looks like Google Chrome.

The National Health Service in Britain isn’t universally admired for its IT efficiency. But Miles Gray, the urbane hardware solutions architect for the NHS, said at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London that if carefully implemented, the cloud can help the service gain effectiveness and save expenses.

Fast, inexpensive primary storage that can store all your files and host all your applications that you don’t have to have in your data center sounds like nirvana, but it may be coming sooner than you think. In some situations it is ready now.

A UK pest control company with an international presence has standardized on Google Gmail and Google Apps as a way to tie together a diverse company in 50 countries. "This was never about cost reduction. It was about collaboration," said CIO Bryan Kinsella at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London.

Despite the fact that most of the underlying technology of cloud computing is based on open source, much of the current wave of cloud computing platforms are closed. But a new open source initiative is hoping to fully open up cloud computing.

Last week I read a few interesting articles about storage in desktop virtualization, VDI in particular. The consensus is that this storage belongs on local disk, not the SAN. One industry expert even says you can use SSDs locally and still get away for less money. I beg to differ.

There's a new kid in town when it comes to open source code in the cloud. It's Rackspace's OpenStack, based on both Rackspace's and NASA Nebula's existing cloud engines. Wasn't there already sufficient open source code in play? Why do we need this initiative on top of those already afoot? Actually, we need 3-4 such initiatives.

Google on Tuesday is adding two new features to Google Docs: The ability to translate documents into one of 53 languages and the ability to remove smartquotes.

Google's announcement Monday that it was formally releasing a version of its application suite for government doesn't just represent a Google sales push, but in some ways also indicates that although the federal government is stepping up its cloud computing push, much work remains.

In June, Red Hat moved its Deltacloud open source project into the Apache Software Foundation's incubator. In July, Rackspace made its Cloud Files code open source and will collaborate with partners in the OpenStack project. The Open Cloud Standards Incubator at the DMTF is producing another set. Isn't this just too much open source?

Hadoop, the system that takes advantage of a large cluster for sorting masses of data, looks like a rapidly evolving piece of cloud software. Cloudera, the company that includes original Hadoop author, Doug Cutting, issued a Hadoop front end and deployment system to make it easier to use recently.

The news that Google Apps for Government achieved FISMA certification and accreditation makes it easier for Uncle Sam to sign up for Google's cloud services. But what does that milestone actually mean for federal agencies?

In addition to Mark Shuttlesworth, CEO of Cannonical; Simon Crosby, CTO of the cloud division at Citrix Systems; and Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware, lets add another distinguished South African to the annals of virtualization and cloud computing: Chris Pinkham, founder and CEO of Nimbula.

As hospitals around the world move from paper-based records to electronic systems, they cited disaster recovery as one of their top priorities. While prepping for disaster is good business, shouldn't something else be a priority on the agenda of those embracing more health IT?

I had the chance to attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week in Boston and I was pleasantly surprised to see some very welcome developments and improvements in the companies and products that were at the conference.

Technology leaders with the Department of Energy, the Defense Information Systems Agency, and GSA will outline their next steps in cloud computing on June 15 at InformationWeek's Government IT Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C. With new implementations of infrastructure as a service and software as a service, including hosted apps from Google and Microsoft, the feds appear to be shifting aggressively into full-scale adoption of the cloud services model.

One of the secrets of cloud computing is that cloud software reflects a new architecture that best exploits the clustered resources around it. It exploits them in such a way that one instance of the software potentially can serve hundreds or thousands of users, and a handful of instances can serve hundreds of thousands.

Federal IT managers are under pressure to move beyond the evaluation of cloud computing and into actual implementation. Two early adopters in government next week will share their insights on how to do that.