Cloud Tech News

Over 95% of respondents in a comScore survey of French SMBs said cloud adoption had a positive impact on security, as well as noticing unexpected benefits, such as up-to-date systems and antivirus protection. The study of French small to midsize businesses with between 25 and 499 PCs was conducted by comScore and commissioned by Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, although the respondents were made unaware of Microsoft’s involvement.

I for one have not decided whether I will move my personal information from the many US based providers that I use in my personal life to local alternatives thanks to PRISM. But in this blog I do want to share my (strictly personal) views and thinking on the topic and explore potential alternatives.

HP Enterprise Services has become the latest CSP (cloud service provider) to announce it has passed Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) protocols to get the official US government cloud security stamp. Amazon, as you’d probably expect, announced its FedRAMP seal of approval last week. So what’s that stomping sound you’re hearing? It’s all the public cloud competition rushing to catch up...

A report from CA Technologies, entitled ‘Cloud Succeeds. Now What?’ has revealed that, for many companies polled, their cloud solutions have been more successful than they were expecting. And for companies experienced with cloud, the report notes that more sophisticated systems are being demanded, such as end-to-end automation, more flexible service-level management and – the big one – the ability to flip between CSPs.

For too many businesses, the promise of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend has been swallowed up by mobile workflow challenges and insecure, consumer-grade cloud sharing solutions. It would be easy to predict the break-up of mobility and the cloud, but this is a relationship worth saving. Doing so, however, will take a new approach.

Over and over again, we are pummeled with statistics on how risk is growing in disproportion to security readiness. 91% of companies have experienced at least one IT security event from an external source. 90% of all cyber crime costs are those caused by web attacks, malicious code and malicious insiders. These are staggering numbers - but what is causing this universal security paralysis?

Among the hive of activity at Google I/O, one of the search giant’s more interesting announcements has come in the form of Google Compute Engine (GCE), giving developers increased access to Google infrastructure. Google’s latest push is a further move into the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) space, and culminates in the Silicon Valley company finding itself jockeying for position in a three horse race alongside Amazon and Microsoft.

The combination of public and private cloud is really starting to gain traction in 2013. But why? The most important reason for adopting hybrid clouds, according to 38% of respondents, was that cloud apps were deployed faster. Delivering better value (21%), and being able to meet requirements more easily (10%) were the next most popular suggestions.