Grazed from PCWorld.  Author: Jennifer Baker.

A recent survey indicated that 70 percent of Europeans have concerns about their online data and how well companies secure it and now two Swedish companies, Severalnines and City Network, have begun promoting their newly merged service as "a safe haven from the reaches of the U.S. Patriot Act." Under the U.S. Patriot Act, data from European users of U.S.-based cloud services can secretly be seized by U.S. law enforcement agencies.

"We believe that a service owned and operated locally in the E.U., and fully compliant with E.U. data protection laws, will be very attractive for European companies. U.S. companies with European operations will also benefit from the lower latency of a locally hosted solution," said City Network chairman Johan Christenson.

This gap in the market is also being exploited by other firms such as DNS Europe, Colt and MESH. The latter strongly promotes its location in Germany and "data separation in strict compliance with German data protection laws."…

Grazed from Sys Con Media.  Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Egnyte wants you to bury your file servers – their day is over – and now it claims you can throw your FTP servers into the hole too like they were grave goods to be discovered and wondered over by some next-century archeologist.

In their place Egnyte (given the silly way we spell things you’re supposed to say ignite) proposes its HybridCloud, a next-generation storage, file-sharing and backup scheme originally targeted at SMBs that lately – at least in the last three quarters – has been attracting large accounts, including 30 departments in the Fortune 1000.

It’s thought to resolve a psychological barrier to cloud adoption by reassuringly keeping copies of what’s in the cloud on-premise. That’s obviously why they call it HybridCloud. Companies aren’t supposed to feel they’re losing control of their data…

Grazed from GreenBiz.com.   Author: Leslie Guevarra.

With all the talk about cloud computing and its impact on business, innovation and sustainability, it’s important to understand what the cloud is — and what it isn’t.

James Staten, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, provided his company’s take on the subject this week at the Autodesk University, where cloud computing was Topic A for the annual users conference that drew more than 8,000 people. [Disclosure: Autodesk hosted my stay at the event.]

The main advantages cloud computing provides — connectivity, mobility, flexibility and the power of infinite computing — are easy to grasp. But less well understood is the definition of clouding computing and its key attributes…

Grazed from ZDNet.  Author: Dan Kusnetzky.

I don’t often have the chance to speak with the folks of SurgarCRM. So, it was a bit surprising to have Sugar reach out to me to discuss the company’s Cloud Computing strategy and present a recent example of that strategy in action — an initiative SugarCRM and IBM have been jointly working on to offer Sugar’s Software as a Service (SaaS) offering on IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise cloud computing platform.

SugarCRM’s Cloud Strategy

Sugar has long offered its technology as a service offering and as an open source software project. This offered customers the choice of using either Sugar’s IT infrastructure or their own. Sugar realizes that customers want more choice, higher levels of security, reliability and availability. To that end, Sugar is engaged in developing packaged versions of its technology for different Cloud Computing service environments. One of the first examples to become public was the SugarCRM/IBM initiative…

Grazed from Government Technology News.  Author: Rutrell Yasin.

Most government technology managers face the common problem of how to keep up with policy flow, the steady and sometimes torrential stream of IT directives, guidance and requirements from oversight agencies on how to modernize agency systems.  

But in area of cloud computing, at least, help is on the way. On Nov. 2, the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a “cloud computing technology road map,” a set of steps to setting up cloud systems that its creators said would help clear their path to cloud adoption.

The draft document, "U.S. Government Cloud Computing Technology Roadmap, Release 1.0" (NIST Special Publication 500-293) defines high-priority requirements for standards, official guidance and technology developments that need to be met for agencies to accelerate their migration to the cloud model…

Grazed from PR NewsWire.  Author: PR Announcement.

CloudPassage Inc., the leading cloud server security company, announced today that it was selected as one of three finalists for the most promising startup category of the UP-START 2011 Cloud Awards.  The panel of judges, representing recognized leaders in technology, evaluated 350 nominations from emerging and next-generation cloud companies before selecting a shortlist of finalists.

UP-START sought disruptive and next generation Cloud Computing companies, as well as innovative stealth mode and emerging solution providers who are defining cloud technology.  CloudPassage will be among the award finalists who will present at the UP 2011 Cloud Computing Conference.  The conference will showcase the leading technology innovators in cloud computing, and provide a forum for business and technology leaders to learn more about how cloud computing can enable growth and innovation for companies across all industries…

Grazed from Information Management.  Author:  Penny Crosman.

For Tony Kerrison, the day has long passed when it made sense to question whether cloud computing had a place in financial services companies’ IT plans. Kerrison has been one of the industry’s cloud computing pioneers: In 2008 he helped create an internal cloud for data center servers at Merrill Lynch (back then it was referred to as "stateless infrastructure"). This year he took the helm of the Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council, a group of corporate technology buyers developing cloud standards for vendors.

From his perch in Amsterdam as chief technology officer at ING, he’s at it again, and along the way he is aiming to provide a path that banks in all parts of the world can follow. ING’s project involves building a large hybrid cloud that combines features of public clouds and private data centers, one it will open to other banks to use. The hybrid or shared IT infrastructure, Kerrison believes, will achieve the variable costs, scalability, flexibility, and on-demand availability offered by public cloud computing in a way that addresses the security, compliance and performance requirements banks adhere to in their internal clouds…

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Byron Deeter.

Even as global markets struggle beneath the weight of unemployment, government paralysis, debt crises and Occupy Wall Street, one segment of the economy enjoys explosive growth with the promise of leading the recovery, one job at a time: cloud computing.

Cloud computing is no longer at the leading edge of the software world, but rather from the perspective of a growth investor, entrepreneur, or technology buyer, cloud computing IS the modern software industry. This multi-billion dollar, high-growth segment of technology now encompasses hundreds of exciting companies, covering every major segment of the software ecosystem.  At Bessemer Venture Partners, we were unable to find a single compelling visual to track the leading companies in this revolution, so we synthesized our own based on thousands of meetings over the last decade…