Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Peter Sayer.

Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to give cloud storage subscribers fairer contracts after intervention by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. Such cloud storage services are typically used to store photos, videos, music or digital copies of important documents. If the services shut down or vary their capacity or prices without notice, customers can lose their data, or be held hostage.

The CMA asked the storage service providers to give adequate notice before closing, suspending or changing services, and to allow customers to cancel their contracts and receive a pro-rata refund if they didn’t accept service changes. The regulator last year obtained similar undertakings from Google, Dropbox and five other cloud storage providers…

Grazed from Entrepreneur. Author: Dan Blacharski.

The dotcom boom of the 1990s was a glorious and wonderfully chaotic time. When it began, nobody really knew that there was such a thing going on as a “dotcom boom,” they just knew that there was something exciting and disruptive happening, and they wanted in. Only a very small handful of visionaries truly saw the full scope of what it was and how it would change the world.

There were a lot of things about that time that failed. A lot of companies burned out quickly, a lot of venture capital money went up in smoke and a lot of 20-year-olds found themselves on the unemployment line with nothing on their resume except “Dotcom CEO.” Yet, a lot of things went right too: The innovative spirit changed how we view and launch startups to this day…

Grazed from VoiceNData. Author: Sanjeeb Kumar Sahoo.

Colt Technology Services said it is deploying Ciena’s packet-optical technology to future proof the bandwidth demands of its customers driven by the explosion of IT applications, data, content and cloud computing. The partnership with Ciena strengthens Colt’s high-bandwidth push across Europe and Asia, enabling flexible, ultra-high bandwidth services across its 100Gbps-enabled metro and multi-terabit backbone networks. This network upgrade supports growth across a number of key European markets including London, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam as well as improving inter continental connections into Asia including Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore.

“As the applications and infrastructure that power businesses increasingly move into the cloud and the data centre, the demand for reliable, scalable, and high-quality, business-grade connectivity continues to grow.By partnering with leading technology firms like Ciena, we are signaling our commitment to providing the intelligent, high-bandwidth networks enterprises require…

Rackspace today announced that the company has achieved seven gold and three silver Microsoft Partner Competencies for capabilities spanning application development, cloud platform support, data management, business applications, mobility and productivity. Microsoft Partner Competencies recognize companies in the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) for their proven expertise in delivering quality solutions in a specialized area of business.

"Rackspace continues to grow its expertise in Microsoft cloud solutions as these 10 Microsoft Partner Competencies prove, making the company a reliable and long-standing member of the Microsoft Partner Network," said Aziz Benmalek, Vice President, Worldwide Hosting and Cloud Services at Microsoft Corp. "The company continuously strives to deliver positive customer outcomes with service-oriented solutions to meet our joint customer needs."

The OpenStack Summit-the must-attend open infrastructure event-will feature a new program called "Open Source Days," happening May 8-11 in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center. Open Source Days bring together adjacent open source communities with the goals to improve collaboration and technical integration throughout the diverse ecosystem of open source projects that OpenStack users rely upon.

Community members from Ceph, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Open vSwitch, OPNFV, OpenSwitch, Ansible, OpenContrail and more will each host their own Open Source Day during the OpenStack Summit. The Open Source Days will essentially be a dedicated content track to present software roadmaps, user stories and important cross-community roundtables.

Article Written by David Marshall

Today, Nexsan announced the release of Unity Active Archive and Desktop on Unity. Unity Active Archive integration allows Unity to automatically archive unstructured data with policy-based guidelines into this secure archive. Organizations can further protect their data, but make it easily accessible to their users with the current features including file sync and share, multi-site sync and secure remote access via mobile devices and the web – all without the hassles of VPN.

"Since launching Unity in April 2016 we have continued to expand our product range. This latest integration along with desktop synchronization delivers an industry revolutionary unified storage platform that meets many diverse data center needs all in one product," said Dr. Geoff Barrall, COO, Nexsan. "With Unity Active Archive, there is a fully comprehensive set of data protection features ensuring organizations can not only safeguard the long-term retention of highly critical information, but protect against data loss from ransomware attacks. We are continuously working to deliver ground-breaking and innovative solutions that are designed to complement today’s modern workforce."