The Executive Yuan, Taiwan's Cabinet, has estimated that it will cost US$312 million for cloud-computing tools with its "Government Cloud", or "G Cloud", plan.

Under the plan, the Cabinet will combine the information systems in over 4,000 government organisations around the island into two to three cloud-computing centres. Also, the Ministry of Economic is assessing the feasibility of opening one such centre each at the island's three science-based industrial parks, namely Hsinchu Science Park, Central Taiwan Science Park and Southern Taiwan Science Park.

"Do you fear the auditor more or the attacker?" asks Peter Bassill, chief information security officer at gambling giant Gala Coral Group. It is a key question for IT leaders thinking of dabbling in on-demand computing provision through the cloud. For Bassill, there is only one answer, particularly for firms operating in highly regulated sectors: "A lot of companies fear the auditor more. If you hold data internally, you can show the auditor your controls, but the cloud makes such demonstrations more difficult."

The US federal government spends nearly US$76 billion each year on information technology, and US$20 billion of that is devoted to hardware, software, and file servers (Alford and Morton, 2009). Traditionally, computing services have been delivered through desktops or laptops operated by proprietary software. But new advances in cloud computing have made it possible for public and private sector agencies alike to access software, services, and data storage through remote file servers.

Cloud computing users are shifting their focus from what the cloud offers to what it lacks. What it offers is clear, such as the ability to rapidly scale and provision, but the list of what it is missing seems to be growing by the day.

Kulacom Jordan, a world-leading competitive integrated communications carrier, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Integrated Systems Company to provide cloud computing IT services that will facilitate the delivery of software solutions to ISC customers in Jordan, the Middle East, and around the world.

The UK government's plan to put its IT infrastructure in the cloud is heavily reliant on the supplier community providing working examples and pilots. IT services firm Capgemini, which is running a pilot of a full potential G-cloud, has outlined to Computer Weekly how it might look from within.

Fujitsu has announced its Group Environmental Protection Program, Stage VI, which sets new goals for fiscal 2010 through fiscal 2012. As a stepping-stone towards achieving Green Policy 2020, the Group's medium-term environmental vision that extends through 2020, the new program sets forth specific goals in 18 areas from the vision's standpoints of benefiting customers and society, pursuing internal reforms, and preserving biodiversity.

An online poll recently conducted by Unisys shows that enterprise users are ready to move a broad set of workloads to the cloud, although they remain wary of moving their most critical business-application workloads there. Answering the question "What parts of enterprise workloads would you choose to move to the cloud first?" 46 % of the 120 respondents said that they would choose to lead with development/test and support workloads. Another 17% would move quality assurance and pre-production systems first.

IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), an operators of regulated global futures exchanges, clearing houses and over-the-counter (OTC) markets, has signed a new agreement with AT&T for the provisioning of hosting services delivered through AT&T's internet data centres located around the world. The new agreement extends and expands ICE's eight-year relationship with AT&T.

This year, Netflix made what looked like a peculiar choice: the DVD-by-mail company decided that over the next two years, it would move most of its Web technology - customer movie queues, search tools and the like - over to the computer servers of one of its chief rivals, Amazon.com. Amazon, like Netflix, wants to deliver movies to people’s homes over the Internet.

ePlus Technology has announced that it has been selected by the City of Melrose in Massachusetts to design and implement a next-generation dynamic data centre. The multi-tenancy solution - based on Cisco, NetApp, and VMware technology - will keep end-to-end network traffic, virtualised servers and storage environments secure and segmented from one another, allowing the City of Melrose to offer regionalized data center services to surrounding municipalities and school districts.

Small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) decrease power consumption and reduce utility bills when switching to cloud-based communication services, according to Intermedia, the world's largest Microsoft Exchange hosting provider. Intermedia delivers Exchange, the business email platform, from its cloud infrastructure - four data centres - direct to nearly a quarter million business people.

Google has its head in a federal government cloud. The search engine giant wants to shift federal agencies from traditional desktop and server-based computing to so-called cloud computing, which relies on the web and outsourced remote file servers to deliver e-mail, send instant messages and share files. That shift ranges from software as a service and suites of applications - like Google Apps - to remote data storage.

Colocation provider CoreLink Data Centers has announced it is now providing cloud solutions provider Virtuon with colocation services. "Virtuon found CoreLink to be an ideal partner for our aggressive cloud computing rollout," says Forrest Blair, CEO of Virtuon. "CoreLink's business model, pricing, and responsiveness are the key elements that attracted us and are making it a win for both parties and ultimately our customers."

Virtuon offers a range of virtualization and cloud computing solutions including consulting, education and software development.

Komatsu Australia has announced it had consolidated its telecommunications services with Telstra including the migration to a new Managed ICT “Infrastructure as a Service” to support the company’s growing construction and mining equipment business.