cloud

In the past I’ve written about the cloud space; the benefits, and the dangers. Recently I went to a family reunion, and recognized a great desire for everyone to stay in touch, and share family information. Photos, documents, old home movies. I ended up configuring a website for the family, containing a wiki, blogs, forums, galleries, event calendars and mailing lists.

All of this is contained within an environment called TikiWiki, and excellent, configurable all-purpose wiki-based website that can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be.

For quite some time now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his executives have been touting an “all in” strategy regarding the cloud.

Terrorists are using cloud computing to plan attacks and remain undetected - and the UK Government needs to keep up with such technological advances.

This was the message of Home Secretary Theresa May, who today outlined the Government’s updated counter-terrorism strategy, known as CONTEST.

At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act.

It was honestly music to my ears. After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it.

The question put forward:

The rush toward virtualisation of internal enterprise computing resources and cloud computing can have many advantages, such as server consolidation, but it's largely outracing traditional security and identity management practices.

Memo to tech departments that were caught flat-footed when people started bringing their iPhones to work: You'd better get ready for the iCloud.

Most enterprises face apprehension over adopting cloud computing, and with good reason: Nearly half (43 percent) of enterprise IT decision makers reported a security lapse or issue with their cloud provider within the last 12 months, according to a recent global cloud security survey by Trend Micro.

Reports that cybercriminals have been hosting their IT resources on Amazon's cloud systems have been around for a while, but now it appears that hackers are using the Google Docs platform, according to Mikko Hypponen, chief researcher with F-Secure.

According to Hypponen, because spreadsheets can contain a variety of functionality, even to the extent of interactive forms, it seems that cybercriminals are now hosting these on the Google Docs system.