The latest edition of CloudTech’s look at the best links from around the web has a slightly nefarious tint to it, with stories of scammers, snoopers and sham artists. Thankfully though, there are some good news stories further down, proving good things come to those who wait.

1)  Beware: The cloud’s Ponzi schemes are here [Infoworld]

David Linthicum, writing for Infoworld, sheds light on an announcement by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, who killed off a worldwide pyramid scheme targeting Asian and Latino communities in the US and abroad, promising return on investment for purchasing cloud computing services.

“Investors were told they would receive ‘points’ for making investments or enrolling other investors,” a release from the SEC explained. “The points would be convertible into equity in initial public offerings of high-tech companies their money would help launch.”

Did these philanthropic companies stick to their word? Of …

According to the latest research from government cloud provider Eduserv, a lack of awareness and skills around cloud computing is halting its adoption in central government.

The research, conducted in January and February of 829 civil servants, found that nearly nine in 10 (88%) required some form of training in order to take advantage of cloud computing, whilst three quarters (75%) believed the benefits of their cloud were a mystery to the company as a whole.

The survey results also shed some doubt on the process of migration, even if government organisations wanted to do it.

More than half (51%) of respondents said they didn’t think their department had the technical skills to move to the cloud, while a similar number (54%) said their project management skills were fit for purpose.

The overall effect is one of indecision and panic. Of course, given the survey is conducted by a …

Cloud services provider Interoute has announced the launch of a new virtual data centre (VDC) in Hong Kong, joining other vendors in setting up shop in the lucrative Asian region.

The company also announced that its customers can move data and apps across the entire services platform, across VDC zones, for no cost.

Lee Myall, the general manager of Interoute’s enterprise app store CloudStore, told CloudTech that while European expansion was still key, this was big news for Interoute on a global scale.

“It’s the beginning of us being able to make a global statement about our cloud computing platform”, Myall said, adding the company has a ‘unique’ proposition in Europe.

“There’s a good level of inter-European data sovereignty, but increasingly we have customers that have reach to PAC RIM and North America, and what this means is we can serve them better going forward,” he added …

UK-based hosting provider Flint Hosts has announced the launch of Flint|Charity, a service which offers free shared hosting and discounted cloud hosting to charities.

The free shared package allows for up to 1GB of storage, one hour of free technical support and a name check from the company, while the cloud package offers the requisite name check, hosting on Flint’s enterprise level platform at a 50% discount with fully managed service.

Paul Hopkinson, Flint Hosts managing director, believes having things fully managed will be essential for charities.

“A lot of providers will just give you the server, which is often a headache,” he told CloudTech. “We take that worry out of their hands, manage it all for them, and our systems are as secure as they reasonably can be.”

Hopkinson explained that this philanthropic approach had “always been part of the ethos of the business.”

“We did a …

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aims to reduce costs while improving quality of care.  Of course, those in Healthcare IT have been trying to reduce costs and improve care for years.  Perhaps there are some real opportunities to improve IT delivery around the ACA, and those opportunities may exist more in cloud than traditional approaches.

Delivering high-quality clinical care is impossible without the support of strategic, integrated, and agile IT systems. Today, aligning clinical care with technology requires IT systems and staff to improve an organization’s ability to adhere to the requirements of the ACA.  This means being more innovative when looking for solutions that will provide the ability to quickly comply to the letter and spirit of the law, as well as provide better delivery of care in support of patients and providers.

Why cloud?  The use of resources that is easy to provision, as required, seems to …

With every passing day, more and more IT managers are taking the plunge and opting for the world of cloud. This comes as no surprise when you consider the benefits it brings: adopting cloud gives employees the freedom to work where they want, whilst still cutting costs for businesses.

But with any new technology as soon as the honeymoon period is over, the real work begins. Cloud traffic is growing at an alarming rate, but this the pressure is on the network operators carrying the cloud, not the enterprises using the cloud, to deliver.

More cloud computing means more data centres, especially as cloud providers look to distribute them globally to reduce latency for regional customers.

As we well know, data centres can’t just be set up and left to their own devices, a much more intricate cloud ecosystem to connect each of these datacentres together. The resulting large …

Microsoft has announced price cuts on its compute facility by up to 35% and its storage by up to 65%, days after Google and Amazon Web Services did likewise.

Perhaps this is the least surprising news of the year – Amazon’s price cuts being the second least surprising. That said, everyone suspected Redmond’s cloud announcement wasn’t going to be just renaming Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure.

In a blog post, Azure general manager Stephen Martin outlined the price changes yet added there were two other key factors at play; innovation and quality.

“Innovation and quality will prove far more important than commoditisation of compute and storage,” he wrote. “Vendors will ultimately extol their track records for building and running services far more than their prices and SLAs.”

Regardless, even if the prices aren’t that important they’re being outlined here, being handily compared to the AWS stable …

Amrita Choudhury, Analyst, Software – Infrastructure Solutions

The last decade has seen massive growth in data volumes and there has been a corresponding seismic shift in the way in which organizations deal with data. While storage technology has become relatively affordable and improved, it has struggled to keep pace with the data growth.

Storage infrastructure expansion can be costly and is a continual process. Freeing up storage capacity is never an easy decision, with business requirements and regulatory compliance obliging organizations to have effective backup and disaster-recovery mechanisms in place.

Cloud-based storage has been a catalyst for major change in the backup and recovery arena. It also provides several benefits, including scalability, flexibility, accessibility, monitoring ease, and affordable pricing. Ovum believes that cloud-based backup and recovery is a viable proposition for many organizations, and could help mitigate one of the biggest headaches of IT departments and CIOs.

Using cloud for backup …

It’s a tradition as old as the hills, from the BBC’s scoop on spaghetti trees in 1957 to Google’s Pokemon Maps earlier today. Not surprisingly the hype around cloud has prompted a few firms to try their own spoof stories on April Fool’s Day. Here are three of CloudTech’s favourites.

Digital Science, a technology division of Macmillan Science and Education, posted worrying findings this morning that “the computing cloud is drifting towards the North Pole.”

In a blog post entitled ‘Cloud computing suffers a major blow’, the company has evidence to suggest that “global warming and the changes thus caused in the Jet Stream pose a danger to ‘the cloud’.”

“Further disturbing reports are emerging about problems being created by unidentified data objects (UDOs) saturating ‘the cloud’,” the post reads. “This saturation could possibly result in difficulties with data storage.”

If this hasn’t tipped …

Cloud is ‘driving the bulk of change’ in the software market as Salesforce.com becomes the first pure play cloud company to make the top 10 companies for global software revenue, according to analyst house Gartner.

“The software market has been changing shape over the past five years, and cloud is driving the bulk of this change as software vendors acquire and provide applications and infrastructure technology to support the cloud and the Internet of Things movement,” said Gartner research VP Joanne Correia.

Salesforce.com is the only new entrant in the top 10 with a 33.3% growth rate in revenue from last year – the company now turns over $3.8bn in software according to Gartner, compared to $2.9bn in 2012. The SaaS bods are the clear winners in terms of growth, with VMware (position #8, 14.1% growth) and SAP (#4, 9.5% growth) the next fastest …