Cloud architecture has to be defined in a way that allows applications to move around, or clouds can become the mother of all lock-ins, warned Red Hat's CEO James Whitehurst.

Clouds continue to dominate my life, as they do (or will) many of yours. While major corporations try to convince us to rent space or resources on their clouds, it doesn't have to be expensive, and some services like Ubuntu One, offer some amount of free cloud storage. But public institutions can get in on the act as well, and seed their own clouds.

Microsoft's problem with competition on the cloud, zero cost at China, and botnets

Red Hat's Deltacloud project is developing a open source standardised API for addressing different cloud architectures in a uniform way. Cloud service users can use the Deltacloud API to access Amazon's EC2 as well as private clouds that are based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEL-V); drivers for private VMware ESX clouds and the cloud services offered by Rackspace are to follow.

With threats like Conficker fresh in the public's mind, security remains a top concern for Windows users. Panda Security, publishers of Panda Internet Security and Panda Antivirus, is set to take antivirus where it hasn't been yet: into the clouds. Panda Cloud Antivirus beta bets that nearly three years of development can pay off into a better protection system for users.

All we know right now is that 2008 will be the “year of the cloud” and that right now Linux has a good chance of powering more of those clouds than anyone else.

If you’ve switched to Ubuntu from Windows, there’s a very good chance that the security failings of Windows featured in your decision. By any measure, Microsoft’s record on security within its products is appalling.

One of the areas where Linux really shines is security: you do not really need an antivirus if you are running Linux as an end user. In the Windows world however a good antivirus is almost a requirement as viruses and malwares are commonplace. I have personally seen Windows computers being infected less than an hour after being connected to the internet.

To Bill Gates, "security" is means of advancing Windows and they "need to make this an explicit goal of [their] security strategy"