Since Christmas an increase in response times have been detected from Amazon's EC2 service by Cloudkick, a cloud performance monitoring company.

An average ping latency of 50ms is relatively low and normal. However, Cloudkick has been measuring latencies of up to 1000ms since the 22nd December.

A recent survey of 3,000 IT executives finds IT budget cuts had harmed innovation had stopped organisations winning new business.

Around 53% of CIOs said they didn't understand cloud computing or see how it could save them money. This corroborates another piece of research Majority of European IT Heads Unaware of Cloud Computing.

The survey was carried out by Datamonitor on behalf of BT Global Services.

According to a recent survey by Rainstor, 85% of companies embracing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications want to keep a copy of their data outside of their SaaS vendor's offering.

Although Rainstor is a commercial provider of data repository services, their findings do raise an interesting contractual question: In the event of a dispute with a cloud service provider, how do I get my data back in its entirety?

This issue needs to be included in any commercial agreement relating to cloud services, perhapsusing 3rd party 'data escrow' services.

Following the reduction in outsourcing prices in 2009, analysts are predicting further falls in 2010. The price drops are not just the effect of the recession, other factors include price pressure from customers, increased use of offshore services, and de-scoping of outsource vendor services.

One school of thought suggests that if the economy begins to grow again some outsourcers will try to recoup some of the concessions they have had to make. This, however, is unlikely given increased competition from offshore.

Interesting times ahead for systems integrators and outsourcers as cloud computing becomes more mainstream. At the moment the majority of deals are around desktop applications (eg CSC's recent deal with the Royal Mail), but as the market matures more powerful corporate applications will emerge.

CSC claim to be the first Microsoft partner to win a large cloud computing services agreement with a recent deal with Royal Mail.

Using Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) CSC will give Royal Mail's 30,000 users access to new IT services.

CSC will also provide first line support.

Businesses using Cloud Computing could face loss of control over their data, legal risks and difficulties in proving compliance according to the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA).

For example, legal risks could be created as data is moved between data centres in different legal juristictions.

Recent research of 350 European heads of IT by Portio Research found that over half were not familiar with Cloud Computing, with the public sector being the least informed.

The majority of those who were aware are actually rolling it out.

A different survey highlights that users are sceptical of the hype and are concerned that the growth in Cloud Computing is driven by vendors and not by demand.

Cloudforce London is on the 8th December 2009.

This is a great chance to meet the Salesforce.com exec team, hear user presentations and meet salesforce.com partners.

The event is free and you can get further details here Cloudforce London

Businesses always seek to remove fixed costs and move to variable costs across the enterprise. This is the promise for IT offered by Cloud Computing which offers to reduce the capital intensive process of delivering new projects (as well as reducing time to market).

Diagram showing the difference between traditional funding for IT projects and that promised by Cloud Computing