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Cloud computing is most effective when it can be applied when needed. It's like getting water from the faucet. You get the water when you want to. It flows when you turn the knob.

The hard part is finding the right cloud computing service. It's not like at home. You have to go out and find the service. How you do that can be a task.

Cloud Preservation, a service from Nextpoint, is a simple service for archiving data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other web-based services. The company pitches its service as a compliance tool, but it makes sense as a storage tool for anyone that might want to have a backup of all the information they're putting into these sorts of services. The company crawls and archives pages from the service and stores them as HTML which can then be saved or exported as a PDF. Interestingly, the service can also follow links and archive the first page of each link it finds in any given feed.

If you're in the market for an enterprise SaaS solutions or a cloud management providers, you've got few resources to evaluate the different options. You can check sites like this one, read analyst reports and or ask for recommendations from your colleagues. LinkedIn's new Company Pages opens up a new way to tap into that last option. Much like the fan pages companies can setup in Facebook, LinkedIn now has company pages. If LinkedIn Company Pages catches on, you'll be able to browse your colleagues profiles and see what companies they recommend. And when you go to a company's page, you'll be able to see how many people like it.

Enterprise SaaS and PaaS (platform as a service) vendor Netsuite announced the availability of Netsuite Manufacturing Edition last week. The company's Manufacturing Edition is aimed at mid-sized manufacturers and provides support for "multi-company, multi-plant, multi-location and multi-currency" enterprises. The product was built by manufacturing management software company Rootsock Software on Netsuite's SuiteCloud platform, which opens a new vertical market to Netsuite and escalates its competition with SAP.

We take a look at the future of cloud computing services this week. We want to know: What companies do you think will be at the top of the cloud world in five years?

This past week, we had 93 people respond to the question:
'Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?" The respondents were pretty much in full support of the open approach. Of the 93 people who responded, 83 said, yes, there is a place for open-source. But we wonder what it will take to get such a movement to a pace of note. We do have faith in the open-source way but how will this effort transfer to the data center?

A hypothetical discussion between a cloud consultant and his client that is just too good not to post. Just be forewarned - this is NSFW.

A hypothetical discussion between a cloud consultant and his client that is just too good not be posted on this late Tuesday night. Just be forewarned - this is NSFW.

An apparent DDoS attack on Amazon Web Services (AWS) over the weekend left a web-hosting code service down for about 20 hours before the problem became resolved. The attack raises questions about how fast Amazon responds to its clients in times of attack and what level of trust customers should place with one cloud service provider.

Microsoft has released a preview of two database products: the next SQL Server as well as a free trial of SQL Azure. The first is a chance to get your hands on pre-release code for the company's flagship offering in the database space; SQL Server 2008 R2 is the formal name for the newest iteration of the platform. SQL Azure is probably something more unfamiliar. It's a relational database built on its Azure platform for the cloud.

In a recent interview with Network World, Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, defends the company's upcoming web browser (Opera 10)'s  "Unite" feature - the new technology that turns your browser into a web server. He said that Unite's decentralized nature makes it more difficult for hackers to break into computer systems - not easier.

That claim is probably meant to fight back against some people's initial concerns that hosting files on their own PC will leave them open to attack. However, simply addressing security issues is somewhat missing the point about the real trouble with Unite: it's not solving a problem we actually have.