CSA warns PRISM is very bad news for US cloud providers
Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.
The after-effects of PRISM means that companies are much less likely to use US-based cloud service providers (CSPs), according to a survey from the Cloud Security Alliance. 56% were less likely to use US-based providers, with one in 10 going as far to say that they’d cancelled a project which used US CSPs as a result. Only 3%, interestingly, said their confidence in US vendors had increased.
It’s noticeable that, from the vendors’ perspective, their confidence had not been diminished. 64% said the incident had not hindered their prospects of conducting business outside the US. Yet in terms of general security policy, respondents did not feel at ease about governmental transparency and legitimacy. Almost half (47%) of those polled said that their country’s processes in obtaining criminal information were “poor…there is no transparency in the process and I have no idea how often the government accesses my information.”…
Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) is currently the number two provider of cloud computing. The company has been under the microscope lately as its stock has dropped nearly 45% year-to-date. But the microscope is not just fixated on Rackspace, it’s also focused on the entire cloud computing sector. This sector is growing rapidly with analysts speculating enthusiastically that the overall cloud market could reach anywhere from $40 billion to $70 billion by 2016 or earlier.
Digi-Key has announced the signing of a distribution agreement with Electric Imp, a company which supplies cloud services and associated wi-fi-enabled hardware platform to connect devices to the Internet. Two versions of the Wi-Fi-enabled Imp hardware, the small user-removable card (imp001) and solder-down module (imp002), are available.
Google has introduced a cheaper rival product to the Apple TV set-top box with Chromecast, a small portable device that streams video and music from people’s computers and mobile devices to their televisions. The product, which will retail for US$35, will be available in the U.S. now from Amazon, BestBuy.com and Google’s Play Store. It will also be available from brick-and-mortar Best Buy stores starting Sunday, Google executives announced Wednesday during a meeting with the media in San Francisco. Google is working to bring the device to other countries as quickly as possible, executives said.
Leading international provider of cloud orchestration software, 
Amazon Web Services has filed a complaint against the federal government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, challenging the need for and scope of corrective action taken by the Central Intelligence Agency in following recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office. GAO made the recommendations to the CIA in June in sustaining a bid protest filed in February by IBM after the CIA awarded AWS a contract worth up to $600 million over four years to build a private cloud for the entire intelligence community.
Increasingly, enterprises are adopting private infrastructure as a service (IaaS) clouds to take advantage of the scalability and flexibility inherent in cloud environments while avoiding the security and latency issues associated with publicly hosted settings. As a result, organizations are also reevaluating how to optimize their future application delivery models. To help facilitate this effort, WSO2 and SUSE will jointly present a webinar on how IT professionals can efficiently address modern enterprise challenges and changing business demands using SUSE Cloud, the first enterprise OpenStack distribution, and WSO2 Stratos, the most complete open platform as a service (PaaS).