A flurry of cloud-based service offerings from IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard seek to convince organisations that cloud computing is here to stay.

HP’s Cloud Assure has the broadest appeal and is essentially a repackaging of the company’s infrastructure management offerings in areas such as application security, performance management and availability. These applications, traditionally installed in the data centre, are now being offered as pay-as-you-go services to businesses developing or using cloud services.

Public sector Microsoft