Newvem, which sells a tool that allows users to track and optimize their use of cloud computing resources, has expanded its software's functionality to monitor not just Amazon Web Services, but now Microsoft Azure now as well.

Usually Amazon Web Services, which many consider to be the leader in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing market, is pretty hush-hush about the internal workings of its massive cloud.

Many enterprise IT shops may be reluctant to jump head first into cloud computing. After all, there are a variety of concerns that come with using the cloud, from security to integrations with existing systems, and perhaps most scary: What the cloud will mean for your IT job.

Google, attempting to build its reputation as an enterprise and developer-focused cloud computing provider, today said its cloud platform is open for anyone to signup for, and can be used with a new by-the-minute billing scheme.

Fresh off the acquisition of a company that specializes in helping customers manage resources across multiple public clouds, Dell said it is "refining" its own plans to build a public cloud based on OpenStack.

Downloading open source applications can sometimes be a pain in the neck. There can be multiple drivers, a variety of related components and a handful of little status bars that move from left to right at varying rates of speed.

A recent survey by Forrester found that 7 per cent of IT executives and 9 per cent of business leaders feel they have gained a true return on investment from Big Data. That means there's a lot more business can be doing to glean insights from the massive amount of data that's potentially available to them.

The combination of highly virtualised environments inside enterprise networks, along with an explosion of mobile traffic, are exposing the limitations of existing networks, and driving the need for a new era of dynamic and scalable networks of the future, IDC researchers said in a panel discussion at Interop this week.

Dell has purchased Enstratius, a company that allows customers to manage cloud resources across multiple providers from a single management console for an undisclosed sum this week.

The network at one of the biggest annual networking shows is being subject to a series of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) creating the equivalent of 90 million sessions attempting to use the network at the same time, all as part of a controlled test of the Interop network.

Cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is for renting storage and compute capacity from a service provider, delivered via an Internet connection. Similarly, software as a service (SaaS) is for accessing applications that are hosted in the cloud.

Facebook used to be a company just like many others: It would buy servers, racks and other hardware from vendors like HP and Dell and rent out co-location space from vendors like DuPont Fabros and others.

Service level agreements in the cloud computing market are skewed in the favor of providers, can be difficult for customers to decipher and in some cases are rigid and non-negotiable. Those are some of the findings from the Cloud Standards Customer Council, a user advocacy group that recently reviewed SLAs from some of the industry’s largest providers.

Twitter, the increasingly popular micro-blogging service, has come under quite a bit of criticism in the past few weeks. Users of the platform, which describes itself as an "information-sharing network" are struggling with what to do about false information being spread around.

Is Cloud computing really catching on in the enterprise? Well, that depends on who you talk to, recent surveys have found.