HP opens the doors to its public cloud offering in one of the industry's highest profile OpenStack deployments.

There's a little more to it than getting in touch with Amazon and giving them your credit card number, writes by Mike Martin of Logicalis.

Private clouds will alleviate some concerns like security but they are no panacea. The journey to the cloud will change almost everything you think you know about IT, writes Kevin Gruneisen of Logicalis.

Before ascending into the virtual world of puffy white haze, be sure your strategy is clear enough to keep your focused on the business, writes Faisal Hoque of BTM Corporation.

Service management tools are a must if you want to get the most out of your cloud initiatives, writes Dennis Drogseth of Enterprise Management Associates.

Like it or not, IT is changing all around you and there's not much you can do about it except to embrace the technologies at the heart of that change, writes Dennis Drogseth of Enterprise Management Associates.

Unlike other prognosticators, Futurist Dan Burrus does this for a living and, since he's been making a living for a long time, he's usually right.

Ever thought about selling ads on your servers to let other companies reach your employees? 2012 might be the year you do, writes Lem Lasher of CSC.

Many of the usual suspects will continue to be a force in 2012 but two specific trends will keep IT departments in two major industries hopping, write Neil Saward and Deepak Bharathan of PA Consulting Group.

2012 won't necessarily bring new security concerns just new technologies to secure, writes Geoff Webb of Credant Technologies.

Having IT and business leaders speaking two different languages is a dysfunction no organization can afford in today's down economy, writes Greg Baker of Logicalis.

The patch-work of jurisdictions and bolt-on federal rules could leave you in a very bad position if you don't know where your data is, writes Jake Frazier of the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council (CGOC).

As companies rush to embrace cloud security will be just another after thought , writes Geoff Webb of Credant Technologies.

For one thing, get your potential provider to release their SLA without an NDA and see what happens.

 (And three not to ... )

Any discussion about utility computing's (a.k.a., cloud, on-demand, shared services, etc.) real benefits is still a little premature, writes Max Staines of Compass Management Consulting.

Until ROI and TCO can be fully examined, it's still too early to know if cloud can replace traditional offshore outsourcing.

Talk about disaster recovery (BC/DR in IT-speak) in business terms and the CFO can be sold, writes Greg Baker of Logicalis.