I’m at Gartner’s business continuity management summit (BCM2) this week, and my second talk, upcoming later this morning, is on the relevance of colocation and cloud computing (i.e., do-it-yourself external solutions) to disaster recovery.

My recent written research has been all focused on cloud, although plenty of my day to day client time has been dealing with more traditional services — colocation, data center leasing, managed hosting, CDN services. Yet, cloud remains a persistent hot topic, particularly since it’s now difficult to have a discussion about most of the other areas I cover without also getting into utility/cloud and future data center strategy.

Here’s what I’ve published recently:

How to Select a Cloud Computing Infrastructure Provider. This is a lengthy document that takes you methodically through the selection process of a provider for cloud infrastructure services, and provides an education in the sorts of options that are currently available. There’s an accompanying Toolkit: Comparing Cloud Computing Infrastructure Providers, which is a convenient spreadsheet for collecting all of this data for multiple providers, and scoring each of them according to your needs.

Cool Vendors in Cloud Computing System and Application Infrastructure, 2009. Our Cool Vendors notes highlight small companies that we think are doing something notable. These aren’t vendor recommendations, just a look at things that are interesting in the marketplace. This year’s selections were AppZero, Engine Yard, Enomaly, LongJump, ServePath (GoGrid), Vaultscape, and Voxel. (Note for the cynical: Cool Vendor status can’t be bought, in any way shape or form; client status is not at a consideration at any point, and these kinds of small vendors often don’t have the money to spend on research anyway.)

Key Issues for Managed and Professional Network Services, 2009. I’m not the primary author for this, but I contributed to the section on cloud-based services. This note is targeted at carriers and other network service providers, providing a broad overview of things they need to be thinking about in the next year.

I’m keeping egregiously busy. I recently did my yearly corporate work plan, showing my productivity metrics. I’ve already done a full year of work, based on our average productivity metrics, and it’s April. That’s the kind of year it’s been. It’s an exciting time in the market, though.