Millions of Hotmail users were unable to access their accounts for at least two hours this morning after Microsoft’s Cloud suffered an outage, according to reports.

Problems began at around 4am this morning however, it was reported in a company blog that Microsoft had sorted the problem by 5.45am, although repairs went on for some time after this. Commenting in its 365 Twitter feed, Microsoft suggested the problems were down to an issue with the Domain Name System.

In addition to Hotmail, the outage...

HDS buys BlueArc, any surprises here?

By Greg Schulz

Technically here in the northern hemisphere it is still summer, so there is another summer wedding to announce.

The other day Hitachi Data Systems (aka HDS) announced that they finally tied the knot

HP has finally announced its long awaited cloud services offering with the launch of Cloud Compute and will be in direct competition with Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace.

The new beta IaaS offering will provide storage for private, public and hybrid cloud platforms and a limited number of clients will be able to use the beta. It will allow users to deploy compute instances on-demand as well as customising them to handle clients’ unique workloads and offering scalability options.

HP Cloud Object Storage...

By Guest Blogger Erik Heels, Partner at Clock Tower Law Group, experts in patent law

Wikipedia defines "cloud computing" as "the logical computational resources (data, software) accessible via a computer network (through WAN or Internet etc.), rather than from a local computer.  Managing local computers is hard: there are security issues, computer lifecycle issues, accessibility issues.  Cloud computing, ideally, is easy: set it and forget it,...

It’s time to think about time.

According to Wikipedia, in physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. In cosmology, the concept of spacetime combines space and time to a single abstract universe. But you know we’re not here to talk about physics, cosmology, or the universe, as interesting as they may be.

For this moment in time, I want you to think of Cloud computing along the lines of space and time, because too many businesses shifting to the Cloud are...

 some of my recent posts, I had mentioned that the risk of Lockins on a Cloud can have a significant impact for businesses running their services on the Cloud. I had mentioned about Cloud services like CloudSigma which offers data portability without lockins

The prescient quote by William Gibson aptly describes the worldwide Software as a Service (SaaS) market today, especially in the enterprise.

Global adoption and growth of SaaS within enterprises is unevenly distributed yet growing rapidly.  One...

Last week at VMworld we asked a secret shopper to visit all the major cloud management vendors (BMC, CA, HP, IBM, and CA Nimsoft) and ask the Toughest Cloud Management Question.

VMworld is a great place to do this. Because the attendees are very smart and experienced and the people working the vendor demonstration stations know their products very well.

Companies are increasingly migrating to the private cloud but are less enamoured with the prospect of public cloud services, a report has revealed.

A survey of IT managers by IT solutions company, Precise has found that businesses seems to be switching onto the benefits of virtual computing with 37 percent saying they will migrate 61 percent or more of their applications to a private cloud environment in the future. But while cloud technology remains the next Big Thing in IT, only six percent of companies are...