Skandia has awarded Logica a three year, £12.5 million, contract to provide private cloud-based infrastructure.

The solution provides capacity on demand and also reduces Skandia’s carbon footprint.

Netsuite suffered a 30 minute service outage on the 27th April preventing access to its cloud-based applications to customers worldwide.

The Netsuite service has been highly reliable in the past but with growing customer numbers there is a question mark overwhether the company provided sufficient information about the outage.

The outage is reported to have been caused by network issues and Netsuite is still investigating.

The UK government’s Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC EES) came into effect on the 1st of April 2010.

easyJet has signed a multi-year subscription to use Proofpoint's cloud-based email security solution, Proofpoint ENTERPRISE™.

Proofpoint's SaaS (Software as a Service)solution will provide protection from spam, viruses, phishing attacks and other email-borne threats.

Highlighting that moving to the cloud is still far from straightforward, Royal Mail's head of infrastructure gave his account of their journey.

Speaking on the first day at the Cloud Computing Congress in London, Adrian Steel discussed some of the obstacles they encountered whilst negotiating the migration to Microsoft's BPOS service.

The Royal Mail is currently replacing its old Lotus Notes systems which provide email and collaboration applications to 30,000 users.

CSC has named Google as a key partner in its cloud computing strategy.

CSC is building on its relationship with Google which began last December when the systems inntegator rolled out Google Apps together with CSC's secure cloud services to a US government department.

Under the partnership CSC will offer Google's SaaS applications including Gmail, Google Calender and Google Docs.

CSC's cloud service will integrate and manage the overall solution for clients, and provide first line support.

Seemingly at odds with Larry Ellison's protestations, Oracle have launched a series of 1 day seminars offering to teach organisations how to take advantage of cloud computing.

Inviting IT professionals to "..break through the haze around cloud computing" the events are being staged around the world.

Unisys is helping the Nationwide Building Society to virtualise 500 servers as part of Nationwide’s Data Centre Transformation Programme. The programme will rollout over several years and will reduce operational and energy costs, with anticipated savings of £8m.

So far Nationwide has achieved a 12-1 reduction in the number of physical servers, deceasing their carbon footprint through a reduction in power and air-conditioning usage.

LV=, the UK financial services compay, has extended its IT services contract with Atos Origin by four years.

Atos provide midrange and mainframe hosting services. The original contract was signed in 2008.

CODA Group announces that it has completed a successful beta programme for CODA 2go, and is offering a free 30 day online trial and demo at http://www.coda2go.com/freetrial

CODA 2go is the first international SaaS accounting system developed on salesforce.com’s Force.com platform. The service is integrated with Salesforce CRM applications and runs on salesforce.com’s global service infrastructure.