Selected excerpts from the official press release are below. You can read the fill press release here.

Cloud computing is enabling enterprises of today to vary their asset footprint and build scalable designs that respond to market needs. As a part of the collaboration, Wipro Infotech will offer the Eucalyptus' Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution as part of its end-to-end enterprise cloud computing offering. Wipro will provide integrated solutions for planning, building, and managing scalable, elastic cloud services for enterprises.

"Our partnership with Wipro will provide customers with the expertise to quickly deploy reliable, cost-effective on-premise clouds," said Marten Mickos, CEO of Eucalyptus Systems. "As one of the world's leading IT consulting organizations, Wipro provides a 'one-stop shop' for customers looking to architect their applications and infrastructure for the cloud. This partnership will play an important role in enabling enterprises to transform their IT operations so that they have the flexibility and scalability to meet business demands."

As part of the Eucalyptus - Wipro partnership, the companies plan to deploy a cloud computing Center of Excellence (CoE). The CoE is a Wipro hosted Eucalyptus cloud computing environment specifically designed to allow customers to easily and securely test cloud services, migrate current applications, and rapidly develop and deploy new cloud applications.

"Eucalyptus provides an enterprise ready, open source cloud platform that will serve as a core part of our complete technology-and-services cloud computing solutions. We strongly believe in our partnership with Eucalyptus as they have enabled the deployment of over 25,000 clouds in more than 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies. This expertise will help Wipro customers optimize spend and increase business agility in increasingly competitive markets," said Achuthan Nair, Sr. Vice President & Business Head - Professional Services Division, Wipro Infotech.

Wipro and Eucalyptus will hold a Webinar on "How to Transform Enterprise Applications to On-premise Clouds with Wipro and Eucalyptus" on Wednesday, March 14 at 8:30 pm PT / Thursday, March 15 at 10:00 am IST. To register, please visit: http://www.eucalyptus.com/webinar/wipro-eucalyptus-webinar.

Now that we are a little over a week into 2012, it is time to discuss a few things that I usually have all of my clients revisit every year - at least. It is no secret that the number of hacking attempts and identity theft in general are on the rise. There are a handful of things that you can do to help protect yourself from both of these, and most of them require little more than your time and attention.

The single most important thing I advise my clients to do in order to prevent being hacked or otherwise digitally frauded is to change your passwords often (at least once a year) and make them complex. Making a complex password is actually a simple thing. Remembering that password, however, is the challenging part. There are numerous utilities and applications out there that help with this as well. A good rule of thumb for password complexity is to use more than 6 characters, both upper and lower case letters, a few symbols, and make sure your password is not something that can be found in a dictionary. I will slide in a small recommendation here that I believe will help everyone in huge ways. Use words or phrases that are motivational as part of the password so that every time you type it, you are reminded of something positive. For instance, DoubleS@1es!! could remind you of your yearly goal to double sales from last year. AlwaysBN3tw0rk1ng!! could remind you to network at every opportunity you get.

Since it is 2012, make this year's passwords especially motivating since this could be our last year on the planet! If we happen to roll on past December 21, 2012, at least you spent the year working in a super positive mode, and that may pay off huge in 2013.

With passwords taken care of, the next two most important things on the list are to make sure your system updates (Windows Updates, Apple Software Updates) are all current and that your anti-virus is also updated. These two things close many holes that hackers can use to get into your systems and steal confidential information.

My last recommendation does actually cost some money, but it is vitally important and also frequently overlooked: the technologically advanced paper shredder. I can't tell you how many people do not have a paper shredder or use a paper shredding service. Make sure you get one that does cross-cut or confetti shredding, not just the strips. You want to make it as hard as possible for someone to reconstruct the documents you are attempting to destroy. More expensive shredders can also shred credit cards and CDs/DVDs that may contain sensitive information. I shred everything as I am semi-paranoid about these types of things, but at the very least, you should shred all personal, financial and business documents that you would otherwise throw away. You can also shred anything that has your name and address on it for that extra layer of security.

I hope these tips help you in 2012, and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments section. Feel free to share this with anyone you think may benefit.

If we compare the progress of disk sizes over the last decade from megabytes to terabytes, it would follow that in order to move that data quickly between machines we need terabit connections. Unfortunately, progress essentially stopped with the gigabit ethernet connection until recently when we saw the 10 gigabit ethernet connection hit the market. Overall, however, the amount of 10 gigabit networks in place today versus gigabit networks is tiny. Systems architects and engineers have known about this issue for a long time, but the Cloud has pushed the issue to the forefront as it stresses the current capacities of networks around the world.

Cisco has just released its Global Cloud Index for 2010 to 2015 and it estimates that global cloud computing traffic will grow by a factor of 12, from 130 exabytes to 1.6 zettabytes annually by 2015. Keep in mind that 1 zettabyte is 1 trillion (that's right - with a T) gigabytes. That is a massive amount of data that will be moving across connections that are predominantly 1 gigabit or slower. According to the report, the Cloud currently occupies 11 percent of datacenter traffic but will triple to occupy 33 percent of that traffic by 2015.

Also, by 2015, the composition and direction of datacenter traffic will shift to where 76 percent of that traffic will remain within the datacenter, 17 percent of the traffic will leave the datacenter toward and end-user and 7 percent of the traffic will go between datacenters for things like storage replication, multi-site application communication, off-site backups and Cloud bursting (federation). By 2014, Cisco estimates that over half (51%) of the datacenter workload will be within the Cloud infrastructure versus the traditional infrastructure. This is huge for private and public Cloud vendors as they must prepare to handle this massive shift of workloads to their Cloud infrastructures.

"Cloud and data center traffic is exploding, driven by user demand to access volumes of content on the devices of their choice. The result: greater data center virtualization and relevance of the network for cloud applications and the need to make sense of a dynamically evolving situation,” said Suraj Shetty, vice president of product and solutions marketing for Cisco. “The Cisco Global Cloud Index provides insight into this traffic growth and trends so that organizations can make strategic long-term decisions. We will continue to develop and release the Cisco Global Cloud Index on a regular and ongoing annual basis, contributing to ‘cloud readiness' efforts worldwide."

As a Cloud Architect, all I have to say is that Cisco, or another networking vendor better bring the terabit connectivity, and fast! When you add the total amount of Cloud traffic that will need to flow between datacenters to the growing amount of data being replicated between SANs, you quickly realize that even 10 gigabit networks are inadequate for where we are headed. Its time networking caught up to disk, processor and memory density, and that means terabit networks.