Grazed from ReadWriteWeb.  Author: Klint Finley.

Microsoft has admitted that it will hand over data to the U.S. government, if properly requested, even if that data is stored somewhere other than the U.S.

The issue, according to ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker, is that because Microsoft is a U.S. company it has to comply with the Patriot Act, and that means handing over data that may be offshore. The same rules would apply to Amazon Web Services and any other U.S. based cloud provider that has servers overseas…
 

Grazed from IT Business Edge.  Author: Susan Hall.

You gotta love the headline on the Federal Computer Week piece, "How cloud computing messes with your team." It covers an IDC report that looks at how the move to cloud offerings will affect the government IT work force. Lots of IT folks, not just in government, are worried about what the cloud will mean for their jobs.

Grazed from Data Center Knowledge.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Here’s a straightforward way to accelerate the adoption of cloud services: Create standardized service offerings and make them transparent to users.

That’s the idea behind the new Service Catalog Usage Model from the Open Data Center Alliance. This document—one of eight Alliance usage models released recently—spells out the requirements for a standard, comprehensive catalog mechanism that will allow users to select and assess service offerings.

Grazed from Cloud Pro.  Author: Frank Jennings.

When the Amazon outage was hitting the headlines a few weeks back the blogosphere was quickly filled by aggrieved customers complaining that their businesses had been hit and their finances had been seriously hit. There was much talk of suing Amazon for compensation over lost business.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:   Leo King.

Last night saw the hotly contested Techworld Awards take place in Dartmouth House in central London.

Sixteen worthy winners received their awards on the night, including SciVisum and Tesco, who were awarded for the best Cloud Product, the SciVisum iPhone Application Monitor. The product is an enterprise strength monitoring solution for iPhone apps.

Grazed from ComputerWorld.  Author:   Antony Savvas.

Only one-in-ten IT directors believe the bandwidth at their disposal is sufficient for migrating data and applications into the cloud.

A survey of IT directors at organisations employing over 1,000 staff found that 91 percent were concerned that insufficient network bandwidth could hinder the effectiveness of some cloud services.

Grazed from Oasis-Open.  Author: PR Announcement.

Cloud computing is predicted to revolutionize the way governments and organizations implement their information systems and applications. The cloud enables better IT resource optimization, virtually unlimited scalability and greater flexibility all at a contained cost. Especially in developing countries, cloud computing offers the potential to spur economic growth and entrepreneurship by reducing the cost of IT…

Grazed from The Register.  Author: Dale Vile.

How can cloud computing be a sensible option when it makes you so dependent on the network, and often even the public internet? If the comms slow down, the user experience takes a dive. Lose the link completely, and you’re stuffed.

We have been hearing such questions and objections from nay-sayers ever since commercial hosted application services have been available. How legitimate are the concerns?

Grazed from Wall Street & Technology.  Author: Ivy Schmerken.

As the economics of building IT infrastructure from scratch become harder to justify, Wall Street firms increasingly are looking to the clouds to lower the cost of operating and maintaining servers, networks and storage technology.

Grazed from GigaOM.  Author: Colleen Miller.