It’s April in Vancouver, which got me thinking about clouds.  Although the IT buzz in 2012 has been dominated by mobile and big data, Cloud computing is still a hot topic, especially since it is an enabler for both.

In the public Cloud space, Google just launched Drive in the same week that Microsoft updated SkyDrive. In the private Cloud domain, IBM recently announced its PureSystems platform, which falls along similar lines as the Exa- line from Oracle.

It will be interesting to see whether or not big enterprises buy into this “21st century mainframe” concept but what’s clear is that enterprises now want to migrate critical workloads to the Cloud, en masse. To realize the true benefits of Cloud, many of these workloads will have to be running off-premise. But since many will remain on-premise, enterprises will be relying on hybrid Cloud infrastructure for their most significant IT services.

Security remains a major area of concern for organizations looking to leverage the Cloud. Increasingly, availability and reliability are also significant concerns, particularly since Amazon has had a few outages recently. In addition to addressing these concerns, enterprises are evaluating how they can optimize processing volumes to get maximum cost benefit from their Cloud deployments.

Please join me at the Cloud Expo, June 11-14 in New York, where I’ll be discussing solutions for each of these considerations. Hey, we should have blue skies by then!