A year ago I laid out my predictions for cloud computing in 2011. In the spirit of honesty and willingness to display my errors in public, I thought it would be useful to recap those predictions, grade them, comment on them and review an exciting, tumultuous year.

EMC has tied its fortunes to the future of cloud computing and is working hard to change the hearts and minds of IT executives so they will embrace the same vision, according to the firm's chief marketing officer.

I don't know how I missed this, but at the Gartner IT Symposium in October, Darryl Plummer (Chief of Gartner Cloud Research) apparently stated that enterprises should deploy applications in a public cloud provider as a default, and only deploy them in a private cloud if the public alternative is not appropriate.

Australian businesses looking to move to the Cloud may experience shorter implementation times following the launch of BizCloud, an on-premise private Cloud service from business technology provider, CSC.

Australian CIOs are concerned about the effect of Cloud sprawl, with the increase in public Cloud services being a large thorn in the side of IT teams, a new survey of C-level executives has found.

Experienced CIOs have learned the hard way that achieving tangible benefits early in the technology lifecycle is no easy matter--whether its OO, CMMI, ITIL or SOA. Cloud computing shows promise and demands attention, but the related hoopla needs to be tempered with a good dose of business sense. The cloud, regardless of its variety, should never be considered an all-or-nothing proposition.

It seems as if every CIO comes back from a conference cocktail party demanding IT move to the cloud. While this can mean many things, including using software-as-a-service (SaaS), managed hosting, or application service providers (ASP), the demand often centers on moving applications out of your own budget-sucking data center and up to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform.

Verizon has rolled out its first cloud-computing service aimed at giving enterprise customers a secure way to host applications not only on virtual resources but also on physical, dedicated network servers.