You’re hard pressed to find any sector of the tech economy that is getting more financing than cloud computing. Today’s announcement by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft is a good example. The two tech giants announced a partnership today that is valued at $250 million. Why are these ventures getting such an influx of revenue? If content is king, then infrastructure in the castle in the cloud. Sponsor Castles cost a lot to build and so does a cloud service. The Microsoft-HP deal is a case in point. The two companies are building a cloud infrastructure that spans hardware and software integration. They are developing their own applications. It’s like an effort to build a massive data center network that works as one giant computer. The investment includes the use of HP servers for Azure, the cloud platform developed by Microsoft. In return, Microsoft software, database programs and other applications will be loaded on the HP machines. Both companies want to own the enterprise. It’s apparent that the two feel this can only be done by having a deep cloud-based infrastructure that bundles a full suite of software and tools to optimize systems for business customers. Stacey Higginbotham of GigaOm makes an excellent point in asking if optimization is the new code word for proprietary systems. There’s a danger in that for customers as it can lead to vendor lock-in. But Microsoft and HP obviously see a need to form their own partnership to compete with the likes of Cisco, which has a deal with VMWare. Oracle, for its part, is still waiting for approval on its deal with Sun Microsystems. Enterprise customers should be wary of these mega deals. The castle in the cloud may look nice but the enterprise customer may find itself in the dungeon if it makes too heavy an investment in proprietary systems that lock them into specific vendors. Discuss

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Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Deal: The Cloud is not Cheap

IBM is teaming up with eyeOS , the maker of an open-source, web-based operating system. We’ve had our (ahem) eye on eyeOS for quite some time . It’s receiving renewed interest in the wake of the much anticipated launch of Google Chrome OS . IBM will offer eyeOS 2.0, available in January, to all customers who buy IBM’s System Z mainframe servers. SystemZ servers are used mainly by large organizations for data processing purposes. So eyeOS will be used as a desktop in the cloud for potentially thousands of enterprise users. Sponsor This is a huge win for eyeOS, making it one of Google’s biggest competitors in the web OS or ” webtop ,” space. IBM has a huge channel for distributing eyeOS, which will better position the Barcelona-based company in the enterprise market. Questions still remain about the eyeOS platform. IBM is adopting the software for availability on its servers, which raises questions about eyeOS as a true cloud offering. The beauty of cloud computing is its ease of use, with the Web as its backbone. As our own Sarah Perez wrote in September about eyeOS : “Besides, offering the host-your-own solution almost misses the point of being a web OS. The promise of cloud computing is that it’s supposed to make our lives easier – our data lives on the web now and not on our fallible hard disks and CDs. We don’t have to backup, because Google (or any other cloud vendor) does that for you. We don’t have to worry with hard drive space either – we use the cloud, sometimes even for a fee, and we can get to our data from anywhere using any device. And all this is provided to you within your browser.” Nonetheless, this is a big step forward for eyeOS and validation that this kind of “webtop” solution may have legs after all. Discuss

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IBM Gets Webtop From eyeOS, Eyes Google Chrome OS

Companies use the term “cloud computing,” a lot these days. Too much, really. The term is hyped to no end. So it is encouraging to see a real example of cloud computing from Alfresco Software. Alfresco is teaming with Right Scale to offer a service that allows for users to scale up and down their use of Alfresco’s open-source content management software. User pay according to how much they use the service. The service uses RightScale’s cloud management platform. Sponsor How refreshing. On the lighter side of things, marketers may want to take some time to read ” 15 Ways To Tell It Is Not Cloud Computing,” by James Governor of RedMonk , an influential analyst firm in the tech world. Let’s use a few of Governor’s points to show how Alfresco measures up. If it takes more than ten minutes to provision… its not a cloud. Alfresco says it takes just minutes to get the service up and running. We tried it and had it going within five minutes. If there is a consultant in the room… its not a cloud. Nope. If you know where the machines are… its not a cloud. No idea. Perhaps the most important factor for us is the ability to scale or scale back when needed. That makes for a compelling use model and truly embraces cloud computing. Discuss

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Alfresco: How Refreshing – A Real Example of Cloud Computing

We’ve all heard security nerds complain about the vulnerabilities of cloud computing; here’s the news they’ve been waiting for. Black-hat hackers got into an unnamed website hosted on Amazon’s servers then proceeded to install an illegal command and control infrastructure. Named America’s number one most wanted botnet, Zeus was discovered on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) by security researchers yesterday. Sponsor The Zeus Trojan is a keylogger designed to steal data such as login credentials, account numbers and credit card information. It creates fake HTML forms on banking login pages to allow hackers to steal user data. This particular botnet has been linked to around $100 million in bank fraud in 2009. Although we don’t yet have details on exactly how the website in question was hacked, we have learned that the software has been removed from the Amazon cloud. This incident is the first example of malware being found on AWS’ infrastructure. As we were warned by black hats in April this year, cloud computing carries certain risks and opportunities for exploitation. Our own Sarah Perez wrote: In another part of the Sensepost presentation, they looked specifically at vulnerabilities of Amazon’s Web Services. To start off, they detailed the process involved in setting up a new instance on EC2… While Amazon has provided 47 machine images they built themselves, the remaining 2721 images were build by other EC2 users. Can you really believe that all of these images were built securely? Basically, the template directory is just a big archive of user-generated content. And you know what user-gen content is like… risky . As John Pescatore told the Financial Times , “The security of these cloud-based infrastructure services is like Windows in 1999. It’s being widely used and nothing tremendously bad has happened yet. But it’s just in early stages of getting exposed to the Internet, and you know bad things are coming.” Will hackers continue to employ web services to carry out their schemes in 2010? Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, and now Amazon Web Services have all been used for evil this year. How can websites, corporations, and end users be smarter about online security to avoid personal and financial loss next year? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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Bank Login-Stealing Botnet Found Hiding in Amazon Cloud

This morning Google announced that “offline Gmail” is leaving the Gmail Labs testing area and will be implemented as a standard feature for all users. Once enabled, this feature allows you to access your Gmail even when no internet connection is available. You can read and respond to messages, star them or label them just as you would if you were online. When a connection is restored, all the changes you made are synced with Google’s servers and any messages in your Outbox are sent out. As of today, all Gmail users will now have this feature turned on by default, however those who have never used it before will need to configure it first in order to take advantage of the enhanced functionality. Sponsor Gears Makes a Public Debut The Labs section of Gmail is where experimental and in-development programs, add-ons, and extra features are housed, allowing Gmail users to switch them on or off as desired. Offline Gmail was one of those experiments, launched back in January of this year. Using Gears , an open source plug-in technology designed by Google, email messages are downloaded to your local machine when you switch to offline mode. Also, if your internet connection is dropped unexpectedly, offline Gmail is automatically enabled. In the year in which offline Gmail has been in testing, the company says they received a lot of feedback from users. Some of the requested features have already been implemented, including the ability to choose which messages get downloaded for offline use and the ability to send attachments while offline . According to the Google blog post , anyone who was already running the Labs version of offline Gmail won’t have to make any changes but those who had never turned on the setting will need to do the following: Click the “Settings” link in the top-right corner of Gmail. Click the “Offline” tab. Select “Enable Offline Mail for this computer.” Click “Save Changes” and follow the directions from there. But Isn’t Google Switching to HTML5? At first it seems like “graduating” offline Gmail from Labs is step in preparation for next year’s launch of Google Chrome OS , the web-based operating system that ditches the desktop, the hard drive, and computer applications for a web browser where everything users access lives online. Because online applications require an internet connection to work, there have been some concerns as to how functional this OS will be in a world that is not yet blanketed in Wi-Fi or 3G. Since Google has made no mention of built-in hardware providing 3G and cellular access as a backup to Wi-Fi, there will be a lot of programs that simply don’t work when you go offline…that is, except for the programs that Google develops itself. The company has already implemented its Gears plug-in on two other products in addition to Gmail: Google Reader and Google Docs . Meanwhile, other companies have also adopted the technology including online office suite Zoho and to-do list app Remember the Milk . What’s odd about this launch of Google Gears into primetime via Gmail is that this seems to conflict a bit with what Google execs announced last month regarding the company’s plans for its upcoming operating system, Chrome OS. During the Q&A session at the end of the press event , an audience member asked about Google Gears support to which Google’s VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai replied by saying that Chrome OS will take advantage of HTML5 for local storage. He made no mention of Gears. HTML5 , a proposed revision to HTML, the markup language of the World Wide Web, includes offline storage as one of its many new features. And it’s this specification that Google’s plans to support in the future, not Gears, according to numerous reports. For example, in a recent article in the L.A. Times , a Google spokesperson was quoted as saying: “We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites.” Also, Linus Upson, the engineering director at Google told PC Magazine that the company was abandoning its work on Gears 2, the next version of the plug-in, and will be focused on HTML5 instead. “You can almost think of what’s in HTML5, with app cache, and database, and those things, as essentially Gears [version] 2,” he said. “That’s how we view it.” Upson noted, too, that the company would be able to influence the adoption of HTML5 through their web browser, Google Chrome, the foundation of the new Chrome OS. “Now that we’re a browser vendor, we can help move HTML5 forward not as a plug-in, but as part of Chrome,” Upson said. So in other words, the Gears functionality being switched on now in Gmail may not be the same technology used a year from now when Google Chrome OS hits the market. That begs the question: why bother? If Google plans to replace Gears with HTML5 in the near future what’s the point of rolling out the soon-to-be abandoned plug-in to all its users now? Will Gears and HTML5 converge somehow or will Google just rip out the plug-in in favor of HTML5′s “plug-in-less” technology instead? Let us know what you think in the comments. Discuss

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Offline Gmail Becomes Standard Feature (But Still Uses Gears?)

Unified communications was a notable absent In Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010. For years, the idea of a common platform for seemingly all communications seemed bewildering. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that even CIO’s were unsure what unified communications really meant. But now here it is raising its flag once again with predictions from ABI Research that the unified communications market will jump from $302 million in 2008 to $4.3 billion by 2014. Seems like a big jump? Not really if you compare it to what at least one other analyst group is predicting. Sponsor Interestingly, the reason for the growth may be in part due to cloud computing, which not surprising is the number one technology on Gartner’s list for 2010. For years, unified communications has held promise as a product or suite of products that had a unifying user interface that, according to Wikipedia , would integrate real-time communication services “such as as instant messaging (chat); presence information; IP telephony; video conferencing; call control and speech recognition with non real-time communication services such as unified messaging (integrated voicemail, e-mail, SMS and fax).” Over the years, camps divided as people grappled with the idea of how all these technologies come together. Cisco recently dumped the term “unified communications,” in favor of “Cisco Collaboration.” They are smart over at Cisco. Collaboration is definitely the new black . There’s not a lot new behind the curtain but collaboration has an edge to it that is getting the attention of the enterprise. But now comes along cloud computing and the vendors seem to be learning that perhaps unified communications should be treated as a service. Vendors like Cisco are teaming up with SaaS services like Salesforce.com and VOIP providers such as Skype. The potential proves to In-Stat that the market for unified communications will jump to $39 billion by 2013. It may be easy to poke fun a the hype around cloud computing these days. But there is actual proof that whatever you want to call it, cloud computing is playing a significant part in the growth of unified communications. Services that interconnect across devices and provide the capability for collaboration are emerging in a variety of flavors. More proof of what is to come? Aire-Spring represents a new breed of telecommunications companies. They are also one of the fastest growing operators. The comany has built an IP network from scratch. The company is processing 4 billion calls annually. Those are big numbers fitting for a market that is just about to burst. Discuss

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Unified Communications: Saved by the Cloud?

Mobile technology, virtualization, the social web, cloud computing – a think tank study has all our good friends on a hit list. The study, which shows primary security and privacy concerns of U.S. government IT leaders, is making the rounds among military and government bloggers. Policy makers are being told that the applications we know and love are dangerous and pose gaping security loopholes for cyberterrorism. Is a Big Brother overprotective meltdown? Or are our advances really causing greater risks for all users? Sponsor The infosec-focused Ponemon Institute polled 217 senior-level IT executives located in various federal organizations. They called out these as the top 5 trends in Internet technologies that – at least from their POVs – put businesses, governments, and users at risk: 79% Unstructured data 71% Cyber terrorism 63% Mobility 52% Web 2.0 44% Virtualization Some of these trends are quite longstanding; however, they still cause a great deal of concern among our friends in infosec. Data breach (40%), cyber crime (40%), cloud computing (39%), outsourcing (34%) and open source applications (18%) also top the study’s list of security vulnerabilities as seen through the eyes of government IT pros. However, Vivek Kundra, a 2.0 champion and federal CIO, said in a recent post , “Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology… ‘This technology supports every mission our government performs – from defending our borders to protecting the environment. IT is essential for the government to do its work, and it is essential that we have access to the latest and most innovative technologies.” It’s sad and frightening to see mobile tech, social networks, and cloud computing called out alongside cyber crime and cyberterrorism as perceived threats to data security. But how much validity do U.S. leaders’ fears carry? The Ponemon Institute reports, “IT operations and IT security professionals identified cloud computing, outsourcing of sensitive information to third parties, external threat of organized cyber criminal syndicates, cyber terrorism, and a mobile workforce… We believe the findings from this study provide government organizations with guidance on which threats are more critical than others to address.” What do you think about the assessment of these high-profile and popular trends being identified as threats by IT execs in government? Is this a case of out-of-touch government bigwigs cracking down on the social web when black hat hackers are truly to blame? Or are so-called social media experts remiss in their duties to ensure that any products they roll out are secure enough for across-the-board use? Or is it a little bit of both? Most importantly, how do we solve the problem of ensuring that government and corporate sensitive information remains secure while users get to enjoy the benefits of Internet-based applications? We welcome your comments below. Discuss

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Think Tank Study Shows Top Web Trends Are Security Risks