Cash-strapped, states going after cloud computing taxes

State governments are taking a wary look at cloud computing and how best to adjust their tax laws to keep up with shifts in technology.

According to a report from Bloomberg, state governments are taking a hard look at the way they tax transactions as the traditional point-of-sale has shifted from a countertop to a Web page.

 CSC offers “on-premise private cloud”

“On-premise private cloud”, my ass. CSC might as well just call this a managed service and be done with it. Frankly, describing this as cloud computing infrastructure is really quite a misnomer. Not only is the service hosted on customers’ premises, but there would appear to be little real opportunity for dynamic expansion of the services used, as in the classic cloud computing paradigm.

Any expansion will necessarily be limited by what ability the customer’s own datacentre has to expand in terms of power usage, cooling, rack space and so on. Just like any other managed service.

 Verizon boosts cloud services with CloudSwitch buy

Verizon officials said it has yet to be determined whether the CloudSwitch software will be priced separately or as a part of Terremark's overall services fee.

CloudSwitch has sold its software starting at $25,000 for an annual subscription, plus further charges based on the number of virtual machines being used, Rubin said.

Many large companies have been reluctant to put legacy applications on cloud computing servers run by third parties, partly due to both the complexity of the task and security concerns, analysts said.

Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing

But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.

While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they will have an impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of cloud services.

The 4 biggest threats facing the cloud

Earlier this week, portions of Amazon's cloud computing service crashed, impairing Foursquare, Netflix and Instagram as well as millions of users. While service was quickly restored, it marked the second major incident of its kind in the last six months -- and that is raising concerns with some.

Putting parts or all of your company in the cloud -- the oft-used term to describe large, remotely hosted data sets and applications -- is typically far more cost-effective than relying on traditional servers and internal IT departments. But, incidents like these can also bring a cloud-hosted company to its knees.

Cloud computing is obviously here to stay. But, here are four ongoing issues to watch out for as adoption rises:

• Outages
• Security
• Servers
• Confusion

Dropbox cloud was a haven for data thieves, researchers say

Researchers who presented their work at Usenix Security Symposium say they had developed the exploits last year but gave Dropbox time to fix the problems before making the exploits public.

First they managed to spoof hash values that are supposed to identify chunks of data stored in Dropbox's cloud. Dropbox checks these values to see if the chunks are already stored in the cloud and if so just links them to the account of the user who sent the hash.

By spoofing hashes, they were able to have Dropbox grant them access to arbitrary pieces of other customers' data, say the researchers from SBA Research in Austria. Since the unauthorized access was granted from the cloud, the customer whose files are being distributed didn't know it was happening, they say.Real

Sprint to launch cloud services this fall

Sprint will offer cloud services to all sizes of businesses in the fourth quarter, a Sprint executive said on Wednesday.

A Sprint spokeswoman said more details would be announced at a later date, but confirmed the executive's comments in an interview published Wednesday.

Paget Alves, head of Sprint business markets, said in the interview that Sprint's offerings to businesses will include selling its network infrastructure as a service available on-demand.
Sprint will also offer software, security apps, and Internet hosting.

Verizon and AT&T offer similar services, and Alves was said that the carriers are "in a unique position because our business is centered around the cloud."

<> Alves also said that Sprint customers' CIOs are interested in having such a service.

Sprint plans to offer services that rely on the company's own data center, unlike Verizon, which is using capacity from Terremark, which Verizon purchased for $1.4 billion in January.

Amazon makes public cloud more attractive to the enterprise

Amazon’s announcements this week enrich AWS and might just win the enterprise’s trust in the company’s public cloud offering.
               
On Thursday Amazon announced three enhancements to its cloud computing offering. These include improvements to existing virtual private cloud and identity management solutions as well as a new option to directly connect enterprise networks to machines in Amazon’s Virginia data center, as Derrick Harris recounts and Amazon’s Jeff Barr details. By enhancing existing solutions such as its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and beginning to offer new capabilities in the form of Direct Connect, the company is continuing the gradual process...

Cloud computing: 4 tips for regulatory compliance

Cloud computing seems simple in concept, and indeed, simplicity of operation, deployment and licensing are its most appealing assets. But when it comes to questions of compliance, once you scratch the surface you'll find more questions than you asked in the first place, and more to think about than ever before.

Compliance covers a lot of ground, from government regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and the European Union Data Protection Act, to industry regulations such as PCI DSS for payment cards and HIPAA for health data. You may have internal controls in place, but moving to a public-cloud infrastructure platform, a cloud-based application suite or something in between will mean giving up some controls to the cloud vendor.