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Security and lack of an acceptable SLA are customers' top adoption fears to move to cloud computing . IBM's recent announcements to further advance their cloud computing initiative known as Blue Cloud should help alleviate these fears to some extent. IBM announced their partnership with Juniper for their hybrid cloud initiative to provide secured private cloud with better SLA. IBM also announced new offerings for the cloud - Tivoli storage as service and a new set of cloud management tools to align with what a typical CIO would look for when migrating to the cloud. In addition IBM is pushing some of their existing offerings on the cloud that customers can now use off Amazon's EC2 on pay-as-you-go subscription model . IBM has been experimenting with the concept of a private cloud for a while. One of such experiments included creating a private virtual cloud inside the firewall to deploy some of the regions of SecondLife with seamless navigation in and out of the firewall.

“If you put a gun to my head and asked me what my firm’s risk was, I would use VaR.” - said Richard Bookstaber, a hedge-fund risk manager. New York times has a long article on the role of VaR in risk management ( bugmenot for nytimes ) that includes the arguments on both the sides. Simply put Value At Risk , known as VaR, is a mathematical framework based on many underlying models that quantifies the risk into single dollar figure with 99% probability. Firm managers really like this number since they can measure individual trader's risk and the total risk of the firm. People such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb who are against VaR passionately argue that not being able to measure the impact of the last 1% could result into catastrophic losses under Black Swan events. He argues that people cannot predict and measure the risk using a model for the events that they have not seen in their lifetimes but the events that do occur in their lifetimes. Nassim is a person who hates ties, loves