When Slashdot posts about Google’s Mountain View Headquarters mowing their lawns with goats, (preceded by “The Manga Guide to Databases.” it’s a relatively slow news day in the tech world; still, here are some short links you may have missed between fighting off Bacon Lung.

Steve Brown over at Network Instruments alerted me that they’ve put out a press release regarding their annual “State of the Network” global study; here’s a direct link, and here’s the juicy bits. 

• Virtualization rollouts surging: Over half of applications will run on virtual machines by 2011
  
• Strong embrace of video: Companies deploying video conferencing to double by 2010
  
• IT largely unaffected by layoffs: 65 percent of network teams haven't or do not expect to experience layoffs
  
• Virtually in the dark: More than half lacked appropriate tools or visibility into virtual environments
  
• Largest troubleshooting headache: 80 percent indicated their chief troubleshooting challenge as identifying the problem source
  
• Emerging technology challenges: 45 percent saw virtualization as the greatest emerging monitoring challenge, followed by unified communications, cloud computing, and IPv6

Obviously not vendor neutral, but perhaps worth thinking about. 

Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers also weighed in with an opinion about cloud computing security problems; specifically, that cloud computing has security problems. 

Speaking during a keynote address at the annual RSA security conference, Chambers said cloud computing was inevitable, but that it would shake up the way that networks are secured.

"You'll have no idea what's in the corporate data center," he said. "That is exciting to me as a network player. Boy, am I going to sell a lot of stuff to tie that together."

However, he added, "It is a security nightmare and it can't be handled in traditional ways."…

"I'm not seeing a huge benefit in the cloud for us," said Bruce Jones, chief information security officer at Kodak, speaking in an interview.

One of the main problems is that Jones doesn't want to give up control of sensitive data to a nebulous cloud-based computing architecture. For long-term computing projects, it's probably cheaper to simply buy the hardware, he said, although cloud computing could work on a small scale at Kodak.

"It's a pilot or an R&D project where they want to do something and they need some kind of on-demand scalability; it's good for that as long as you don't care about the confidentiality of the data," Jones said.

Here’s one of the main problems with Cloud apps – all an attacker has to do is spoof the cloud computing app login page, and he’s got your own passwords, so he can go in and do whatever he wants with the data.  Malicious hackers have been doing this for years with Ebay, which is one of the first “cloud computing apps” if you really think about it. 

In the meantime it is May the 4^th.  May the 4^th be with you.