cloud

In a report announced yesterday by Gartner, by the year 2014 the focus of Internet access would have fully shifted from the personal computer as an access device to “personal cloud” services.

German operator Deutsche Telekom is using OpenStack to host applications in its Business Marketplace cloud service, and is committed to making the open source software more secure and easier to manage, the company said on Monday at the Cebit trade show.

OpenStack is an open-source community that develops software, also called OpenStack, for private and public clouds. It will be used to power some of the applications on Deutsche Telekom's Business Marketplace, an online platform that will offer cloud services to small and medium-size businesses starting in summer 2012.

A study commissioned by Microsoft reckons that global cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs between 2011 and 2015, and that "IT innovation created by cloud computing" could produce $1.1 trillion in new annual revenues by 2015.

"The cloud is going to have a huge impact on job creation," said Microsoft cloud wrangler Susan Hauser in a statement announcing the IDC study. "It's a transformative technology that will drive down costs, spur innovation, and open up new jobs and skillsets across the globe."

I had the privilege of chairing the infrastructure track at last week's Cloud Connect conference. Three of the presentations were particularly interesting, offering a good perspective on just how dramatic an effect cloud computing is having on IT. Summed up, the capability and agility of cloud computing is forcing an extremely rapid evolution.

Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and development service experienced a serious outage on WednesdayMicrosoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and development service experienced a serious outage on Wednesday, with the system's service management component going down worldwide starting at 1:45 a.m. GMT.

"We are experiencing an issue with Windows Azure service management. Customers will not be able to carry out service management operations," Microsoft said in an initial message on the outage on its Azure service dashboard.

What if a cloud computing infrastructure could recognize a cyberattack, eliminate it, and never stop working while all that is being done? That's what researchers at MIT, with help from the federal government, are investigating the feasibility of.

Huawei has given its backing to desktop virtualisation, revealing 45,000 of its own engineers use the technology.

The Chinese telecoms company only began to use desktop virtualisation in 2009, starting the roll-out at its research and development centre in Shanghai.

Google Drive has been spinning around in the rumour mill for months now, but according to word from the Wall Street Journal, the cloud storage service is set to go live any moment now. Will a seamlessly integrated storage service drop a bomb on rivals like Dropbox?

Google Drive is the search giant’s answer to iCloud, Dropbox, Sky Drive and the myriad other online storage solutions. While Google Docs currently lets you store all manner of files to the tune of 1GB, but you have to pay for more and there are limits to do with file sizes for certain types of documents.

More than half of UK businesses are concerned about the safety of their data as cloud computing takes off but their fear is not preventing adoption, with 23 per cent of CIOs already using the cloud and a further 53 percent planning to do so within the next 12 months*.

Around this time last year, the cloud computing contract signings were coming fast and furious -- not just for commodity work like IT management or email, but for software and infrastructure closer to the core of corporate value. Not long after that, the calls started to come in to Greg Bell, principal and the Americas service leader for information protection at KPMG.