Stories by Christine Burns

New tools help IT execs cut Cloud costs, optimise resources, integrate and manage Cloud instances.

The sky is the limit for both the number and the types of tools that will eventually help enterprise IT fully embrace the cloud, say industry analysts and cloud integration experts.

Cloud vendors are delivering boatloads of new tools to help enterprise IT build, buy, manage, monitor, tweak and track Cloud services. These tools are designed to help IT execs free up their budgets and their staff so both can be used towards more strategic, line of business projects.

Here are 12 security products that you can buy for your hybrid Cloud whether they run on premise, in the Cloud or a little of both.

Securing a hybrid cloud is not the same thing as deploying hybrid security products.

Here are 10 predictions for what we’ll see happening in Cloud computing in 2013.

The time for dabbling in cloud computing is over, say industry analysts. 2013 is the year that companies need to implement a hybrid cloud strategy that puts select workloads in the public cloud and keeps others in-house.

If you follow cloud computing, you're no doubt familiar with software as a service, typically associated with Salesforce.com, or infrastructure as a service, which was pioneered by Amazon.com. But how about CaaS, SECaaS, DaaS, MaaS and BaaS?

If you follow cloud computing, you're no doubt familiar with software-as a service, typically associated with Salesforce.com, or infrastructure as a service, which was pioneered by Amazon.com. But how about CaaS, SECaaS, DaaS, MaaS and BaaS?

Hendrickson International Corporation is a leading global supplier of truck, tractor, bus and recreational vehicle suspension and heavy-duty spring components to the commercial transportation industry.

As Microsoft works to convince corporate IT that the underlying VoIP technology in its Lync unified communications platform has the chops to support the slew of applications the Redmond giant has built on top of it, there's no shortage of smaller-scale customers deploying it for interesting uses.

The software as a service market is still in a state of flux and before SaaS can reach its full potential, service providers must overcome integration, customization and brokerage issues.

If you've ever stayed at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, the Chancery Court Hotel in London or the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo, then the Preferred Hotel Group handled your reservation, delivered technology-driven guest services and took care of a variety of other behind-the-scenes functions.

Infrastructure-as-a-service is gaining traction in the enterprise with customers lauding the flexibility that it delivers. However, there is still that nagging concern about vendor lock-in.

We assembled this list with help from analysts at Cloud Technology Partners, Current Analysis, Enterprise Strategy Group, Gartner, IDC and Neovise who watch the public cloud Infrastructure as a Service scene very closely. Each was asked to name the companies they believed have the most influence -- whether that's measured in market share, mind share, revenue, existing enterprise pull or underlying technology links -- in drawing enterprise customers into the realm of public cloud infrastructure. They are listed here in alphabetical order.