A US judge has ruled that US-based providers must hand over customer emails even if they are stored in a location overseas.

The decision comes amidst a challenge from Microsoft with regard to an Ireland-based customer, claiming that as the US government does not have jurisdiction overseas the company should not be forced to disclose user data.

Yet Judge James C. Francis has dismissed this claim, further jeopardising the data security of US cloud providers.

Judge Francis explained the issue at stake....

Exclusive Nikola Pizurica, president of the company which provides the OneBigDrive cloud storage app, has told CloudTech that while Microsoft renaming its storage biz OneDrive “could lead to some confusion” for consumers, the company is focused on its own goals.

“We are going our way,” he affirms, although adding he was ‘surprised’ at the time that Microsoft chose to rename to OneDrive.

Redmond had courted angry companies

Microsoft has announced price cuts on its compute facility by up to 35% and its storage by up to 65%, days after Google and Amazon Web Services did likewise.

Perhaps this is the least surprising news of the year – Amazon’s price cuts being the second least surprising. That said, everyone suspected Redmond’s cloud announcement wasn’t going to be just renaming Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure.

A survey of over 2000 respondents by Microsoft and 451 Research has shown that half of companies have deployed some form of hybrid cloud.

The report, which clocks in at a mammoth 75 pages (pdf here, if you’ve got an hour or two), revealed that 989 (49%) of the 2041 execs surveyed had configured a hybrid for interoperability. Of that number:

• 60% had used an on premise private cloud alongside a hosted private cloud
• 42.1% had combined an on premise private cloud with a public...

It’s that time again: here are CloudTech’s six favourite stories from around the web.

No prizes for guessing which story dominates the selections, but this month’s gamut is a mix of seat swapping, storage and smack talk.

1) Microsoft chief goes back to the future [Financial Times]: There wasn’t any other place to start. The biggest job in the IT industry was announced last week, and it’s not a coincidence that the new man in the...

Fredrik Tunvall, Analyst, Software – Information Management, Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Information Management

Microsoft is betting heavily on the cloud for delivering self-service BI capabilities. Power BI builds on existing Microsoft Excel building blocks, including Power Query and Power View, to provide a single self-service client based on the familiar Excel spreadsheet as the user interface. It is a welcome simplification of Microsoft’s often confusing BI product stack...

UK-based hybrid cloud startup Zynstra has announced the launch of O365Connect, aimed at helping SMBs with a managed IT solution which brings the best of both on-premise and cloud worlds.

The product was developed in association with Microsoft – the name gives that one away – and HP, who is an OEM partner of Zynstra, and is aimed at businesses between five and 250 employees.

Zynstra O365Connect handles various tasks, from networking to file management, to Office 365, as well as maintaining a full...

January is always a strange time of year at CloudTech HQ; the Consumer Electronics Show signifies the last vestiges of the holiday break, with the industry firmly awoken from its hibernal slumber to press ahead with 2014 deliverables.

As a result there’s plenty to find across the web – here are our favourite pieces from the last fortnight:

1) Salesforce CEO...

Microsoft has announced the Cloud OS Network, a global group of over 25 cloud service providers who will deliver services on the Microsoft cloud platform.

The providers include the likes of CGI, Dimension Data and NTTX, and is a concerted play from Microsoft to enable more usage of its Windows Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offering.

“This announcement represents important progress against our goals and strategy for Cloud OS,” Takeshi Numoto, Microsoft cloud and enterprise marketing corporate VP...

Microsoft has announced that its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure has been given the sought after FedRAMP accreditation for US federal cloud computing.

As the American government is trying to go ‘cloud first’, this represents an important milestone for Redmond – if perhaps a little late.

Back in June, competitors HP and Amazon announced that their clouds were secure after gaining federal...