As public cloud technology matures, the aspect of risk will start to fade away. What will remain is the tradeoff between easy/rapid scale on one hand and customization/control to accommodate application-specific environments on the other.

Red Hat announced that its OpenShift Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering now supports Java Enterprise Edition 6 (Java EE 6) by means of its JBoss Application Server 7.

The real opportunity of the cloud is about sharing, not controlling content. Sticking your files on a shared server is great, but it's not a computing revolution. The game changer is the curated cloud.

It's a simple idea. Rather than building and running proprietary information technology, it is available on demand -- through the economical and always-on networks often drawn as "clouds."