Research confirms that Facebook, Twitter and Google are spying on users

big brother (Photo credit: Vince_Lamb)

Social networks: can robots violate user privacy?

ECM Plus +++ Recent news in the international media has revealed numerous Internet privacy concerns that definitely deserve attention and further investigation, which is why Geneva-based High-Tech Bridge  decided to conduct a simple technical experiment to verify how the 50 largest social networks, web services and free emails systems respect – or indeed abuse – the privacy of their users.

According to High-Tech Bridge, the experiment and its results can be reproduced by anyone, as we tried to be as neutral and objective as possible.

Half of firms suffering from cloudphobia – survey

Snoopers (sic) Paradise (Photo credit: the justified sinner)

Fear of governments snooping deters companies from using the cloud

ECM Plus +++ Almost half of IT experts are deterred from keeping sensitive data in the cloud because of fear of government intervention and possible legal action, according to a new survey from Lieberman Software which was released today.

Massive 65% rise in data centre power consumption – survey

Power requirements surging across globalised data centres – survey

Exponential gigawatts more energy being siphoned into globalised corporate data centres

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus /London/ +++ In a sharp rise in expected power consumption by data centres used for cloud computing as a result of globalisation of the IT and corporatist sectors, research firm DCD Intelligence has just taken the wrsps off stark findings from its DatacenterDynamics 2012 Global Census report.

Rackspace to acquire Mailgun for cloud email integration

Rackspace to acquire Mailgun

Rackspace takes aim at Mailgun in ‘open cloud’ platform expansion

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus /London/ +++ Rackspace Hosting, the open cloud company, has just entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Mailgun, Inc., a Y Combinator startup.

According to Rackspace, their Mailgun acquisition will further enhance its product portfolio, making it easy to integrate cloud-based email services into applications and websites within minutes.

British businesses hurt by poor Internet coverage – survey

Jeremy Hunt preached the ministerial code (Photo credit: Gwydion M. Williams)

Government policy under fire as new survey reveals Internet strategy should focus on coverage not speed

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus /London/ +++ A new report of 1,500 British small businesses reveals that 57 percent stated that the ‘poor quality of their internet access’ is now adversely affecting their ability to do business.

According to the findings, by Freelancer.co.uk, small businesses in Britain are now at odds with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who reiterated in a speech at the Google Campus building that broadband speed is more important than coverage.

Judicial hearing in Megaupload user data case

Former federal judge Abraham Sofaer joins with EFF in fight for return of property

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ The Electronic Frontier Foundation, ssisted by retired federal judge and former State Department legal adviser Abraham D. Sofaer, asked a federal judge Friday to order the return of data to Kyle Goodwin, a Megaupload user who lost all access to his files when the cloud storage service was shut down by the U.S. government.

System of a Double Down: First 10 hour DDoS attack crashes SoundCloud

DDoS attacks. Image: kryptyk

On-line cloud firm decked by double major outages in weekday Distributed Denial of Service meltdown

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ On Tuesday October 4 at approximately 8:40pm CET, SoundCloud’s Operations team were alerted to an unusually high amount of unidentified traffic leading to a complete network outage. Within minutes, the company’s Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering and Head of Operations and all available operations engineering resources were deployed to investigate the issue and the company said it “worked around the clock” to locate and resolve it.

WEEKEND PLUS: SharePoint Killer snuffs with hybrid ECM

Flaming avians

Firebird-based Centric proffers on-demand enterprise content management

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Centric ECM has become the first software provider to offer what it calls businessw-class Enterprise Content Management as ‘a true hybrid’ solution and alternative to SharePoint.

According to the company, Centric ECM uses an open-source Firebird database with a WCF based server connection to provide an alternative to expensive ECM software “such as those offered by Microsoft, Autonomy and Open Text” the company said.

Devil’s in the detail as ‘Diablo’ powers open source cloud via OpenStack

Backing open source OpenStack

Fourth community-driven software release extends cloud operating system capabilities for production clouds globally

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Open source cloud operating system OpenStackg has just unhooded “Diablo” – the fourth version of its community-driven software with some 70 new features and enhancements.

The new version now claims to make it possible for a broader community of users to deploy OpenStack clouds in production on a world-wide scale.

Amazon and Microsoft outages clatter cloud integrity

Cloud chaos in blitzkrieg strike

Catastrophic corporatist cloud outages destroying credibility of cloud as a serious business model?

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ In the wake of the dramatic outages at behemoths Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud services, industry heavyweights were quick to weigh in with their take on the ongoing data debacles.

Riccardo Degli Effetti, data centre manager at Rackspace said: “The recent lightning strike in Ireland that has taken down Amazon’s cloud hosting service in the region is a timely reminder that outages occur, no matter how well a technology or technology provider is prepared to prevent it.” 

Data centre conflab to buck Greek trend

Greece plays host to datacentre investment shindig. Image: Aster-oid

Keynote at Data Centre Southern Europe’s inaugural fourm in Athens tackles key issues

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Christos Alexakis, CEO of Invest in Greece – and an economist with a specialization in financial markets will keynote at the forthcoming DataCentres Southern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean taking place in the Greek capital on 19 September 2011.

Alexakis is a member of the academic community as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of the Greek University of Piraeus.

Cloud threat as ‘zombie VMs’ sprawl

Virtual sprawl goes Zombie in cloud threat

Tens of millions of pounds tied up in petabytes of wasted storage as Zombie Virtual Machines continue to be a problem

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Real-Status CTO, Stace Hipperson, has warned that Virtual Machine administrators still need to be extra-vigilant against VM sprawl as more and more users ‘self-provision’ to set up their own virtual machines.

VMs, software implementations of computers that execute programs like physical machines, are the enabling technology behind cloud computing.

Egnyte’s online cloud storage goes Dutch

Online storage at British firms seeking resilience

Safe File Sharing launched as British businesses deal with data deluge

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Cloud file specialist Egnyte has just opened its doors at a new Cloud File Server data centre in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which, it says, will enable it to meet strong demand from British firms looking for secure file sharing and storage.

Egnyte said that small and medium-sized companies now contribute nearly half of money spent on the cloud in Britain and cite remote storage as their biggest reason for using the cloud.

Gyron grows datacentre space with new 8MW Hemel facility

New high availability ‘Maylands’ secure data centre to open in New Year

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Gyron has just started work to bring online an additional data centre in Hemel Hempstead, in the South East of England.

According to the company, when open for customer occupation in Q1 2012, the new Maylands facility will complement the existing Centro facility, also in Hemel Hempstead, that was opened by the company in 2009.

Private cloud costs coming down

Memset goes for the private parts of the cloud

Memset takes wraps off private cloud at same price as public cloud

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Virtual machine cloud provider Memset is offering a new private cloud service for the same price as their public cloud service.

According to the company, private clouds are typically more costly than the public cloud, due to the cloud infrastructure being operated solely for an organisation’s own use.

Video content delivery bursts forth for cloud and mobile

Going mobile - options for video content delivery

Video distribution to cloud and mobile delivery sees debut for Virtual Delivery Node platform

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ BurstPoint Networks has just unveiled its latest extramural cloud-centric service which it said can extend the content management and distribution paradigm via its novel ‘Video Communication Platform’ or VCP, to what it calls ‘beyond on-premise networks to cloud-based environments’.

According to the Massachusetts firm, the VCP Virtual Delivery Node also proffers a gateway appliance to the cloud service and uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver on-demand video content to end-users.

Corporations’ cloud moves are ill-prepared – survey

Corporate calamity? Cloud plans ill-prepared

Large organisations moving to clouds to reduce costs but are ill-prepared to achieve goals according to CiRBA survey

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ According to a new survey by CIRBA, a majority of large organisations are migrating internal virtual infrastructure to the cloud believing it will cut costs, but only 17 percent achieved utilisation and ROI goals with virtualisation, and yet, they intend to use similar planning and management approaches for their move to the cloud.

Disaster recovery driving virtualization – survey

Virtualization: outsourced power

IT personnel not aware of hidden costs – including I/O bottlenecks

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ A new survey by Coleman Parkes and commissioned by CA Technologies has found that downtime costs businesses more than 127 million man-hours per annum.

However, more that 30 percent of both VMware and Microsoft virtualisation users identified backing up VM data as a challenge, and also indentified storage management, I/O bottlenecks and server availability monitoring as major virtualisation challenges.

Beltway boosted by new archiving and records revolution

The heart of the Republic - Washington D.C.

Archive Systems proffers records management services to Washington D.C. Metro area

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Records and document bellwether Archive Systems is unveiling a new records facility serving the Washington D.C. metro area offering advanced paperless records management services for records storage, document destruction and offsite data protection.

WEEKEND PLUS: Germans go kloud kontent krazy

Donner und Blitzen! Germans going Kloud Kontent Krazy!

Germans go cloud-based content management for mobile applications in CMS blitz

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ Looks like the Germans are about to go kompletely knuts over kloud kontent management these days.

According to the Germanic corporation, dubbed ‘StorageRoom’ is a new cloud-based CMS that serves content which is, they claim, a mobile applications on multiple platforms.

Cloud migration held back by ‘lack of visibility’

Cloud migration concerns mount

Are organisations holding back from making use of cloud services due to lack of understanding and reassurance?

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ New research by IT firm Intergence Systems has found that companies are often reluctant to migrate to the cloud when there are still on-going security and management concerns around data management.

According to Intergence, cloud-based services are expanding but are also frequently viewed with suspicion, particularly for reasons such as data governance and security.

Software AG acquires Terracotta in Java cloud move

German company takes control of foreign firm to acquire cloud and memory assets

In-memory and cloud to enable high-performance Java applications for cloud services

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ /Frankfurt, Germany/ +++ The German software firm Software AG has just acquired Silicon Valley innovator Terracotta’s portfolio of products and services which the German firm said will form the foundation of its new in-memory and cloud offerings.

According to Frankfurt-Germany-based Software AG, the combined portfolio will increase revenue with existing customers and expand opportunities with new enterprise customers.

The German software giant added that it would also gain access to Terracotta’s large open source community.

The firm also stated that the acquisition would also enable it to offercloud and to increase performance and scalability of its business process platform.

Digital asset firesale as Autonomy mops up at Iron Mountain

Autonomy’s moves into the cloud platform to expand to 25 petabytes of customer data under management

By PAUL QUIGLEY

ECM Plus +++ Autonomy has just acquired selected key assets of Iron Mountain’s digital division including archiving, eDiscovery and online backup.

In a digital asset firesale that observers see as a stratgic move into the cloud for Autonomy, this means access to Autonomy’s technology for information governance in secure, private clouds in data centres.

LifeSort online backup proffers another cloud content closet

Dutch want to sort your life out

Securing and sharing ‘free’ cloud file management

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ In what is being dubbed as the ‘first real semantic desktop’ a small Dutch startup firm – ‘The Guys That Hope’ have taken the wrsps off what it claims can provide an ‘identical interface offline as online’.

According to TGTH, this new file managment software can simplify the organization and management of what it calls the ‘digital life’.

Web content management takes to the clouds

pTools proffers web content management for cloud computing

Dublin, Ireland. Image: PPCC Antifa

By ECM Plus staff

ECM Plus +++ WCM software vendor pTools has launched a new cloud-based version of System6. According to the Irish firm, it offers enterprise-level websites.

Keith Wood, CEO of pTools said: “It provides extensive functionality on-cloud or on-premise that’s easy to use and easy to scale.”

Added Wood: “When setting up a CMS online you typically buy the software, spec the servers, install, configure, and put the servers in a data centre. You then add firewall boxes and routers, sign a hosting and bandwidth agreement, put it all online and pay annual support and maintenance for hardware, software and so on. With a cloud solution, you just turn it on and start straight away – no upfront hardware or IT support costs, and no hassle.”