Earthquakes, tornadoes, flash floods, tsunamis, lightning strikes. And let’s not forget hurricanes. Hurricane Irene devastated much of the Eastern Seaboard—and the hurricane season doesn’t end until November 30th.

Mother Nature is seriously upset.

Maybe you’ve been sitting on the fence about implementing a cloud computing solution, and that’s fine. But just remember: fences can get pretty uncomfortable if you sit there too long. In fact, you might want to hop off that fence right now, because there’s plenty of evidence that the cloud is the smart option that’s here to stay.

You’ve probably heard the old engineering adage: “cost, quality, time—pick two.” Well, cloud computing lets you pick all three. It can lower costs, improve the services you deliver, and free up your staff to do stuff that’s a lot more innovative than patching OSes and updating servers.

Welcome to the future. Today we have DVRs to watch bad TV for us. Voicemail to give the brush off to annoying telemarketers. And little circular robots to do just as bad of a vacuuming job as my kids do. Automation has indeed set us free.

While my opening may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it does illustrate how pervasive automation is in our daily lives. However, when it comes to managing private clouds, we could still use a bit more.

Got a thirst for knowledge? If you’re planning on staying in this industry, you’d better have a big one. And there’s no better place to quench that thirst than BrainShare. It’s where you can flood your mind with new insights and expertise gained by rubbing shoulders with real brainiacs. I’ve been looking over the session schedule lately and, I must admit, I’m ready to descend on Salt Lake and get my geek on.

Where else can you get direct access to so many IT experts? Have a question about securing workloads? Ask the folks who make intelligent workload management work. BrainShare offers more than 20 hands-on labs which are staffed by product development experts, software engineers, and systems architects.

August 25^th 2010. That’s the day I posted my first WorkloadIQ blog. What a crazy, frantic and exciting year it has been. So much innovation—so much change. Hopefully, you’ve found my blog to be interesting and informative—occasionally even stimulating. Far too many IT blogs these days could be repackaged as digital sleep aids. Speaking of repackaging, did you know, Viagra was originally created to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension? Don’t ask me how I know this.

Well, looking back I’ve chosen a baker’s dozen of my favorite blogs to recap from the past year. Enjoy!

“Hi. My name is Richard. And I’m an iPad addict.” Hey, admitting it is always the hardest step. But what’s not to love? The iPad is thin and lightweight. It lets me check my email and surf the Web from anywhere. And the device always works—just like phone systems used to.

iPads always work because Apple controls both the hardware and software. Not so long ago, phone companies enjoyed the same level of control. You bought your handsets, your PBX interfaces and even your phone lines from the same vendor. You picked up the phone—and you had a dial tone. Even during a power outage, you had phone service.

As I’ve blogged about before, I love my iPhone and my iPad. Now Apple is really swinging for the fences, with its new iCloud service. iCloud, of course, is the wireless data storage and device synchronization service announced by Steve Jobs last month at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. It’s scheduled for release this fall along with Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 5. I watched the keynote with considerable interest, in part because this is unquestionably a great consumer service, and partly because, as hard as I listened, I don’t think I heard Mr. Jobs say the word security even once.

By all appearances, iCloud will be a perfect example of the cloud’s promise and potential. It will provide online storage and backup for music, photos, documents, apps, contacts, calendar and other personal data, with an automated synchronization layer that keeps a user’s content seamlessly available and up-to-date across up to ten different devices. The base service with 5 GB of storage and an email account will be free to anyone who buys a new iPhone, iPad or Mac.