The US case against Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is looking shakier by the day, following news that warrants used to raid his New Zealand home were invalid.

On Thursday New Zealand High Court Judge Justice Helen Winkelmann ruled that the warrants used in January “did not adequately describe the offences to which they related”. Many of Dotcom’s substantial assets were frozen, and property seized including a 20 luxury vehicles, works of art and computers.

Moves by the FBI to copy data from Dotcom’s computer and take it offshore were also unlawful, she said.

In January Dotcom was cut out of a safe room in his $30m Aukland mansion by SWAT officers and arrested along with four others. Now under house arrest, he was initially judged a flight risk and denied bail.

Megaupload was unceremoniously executed, provoking outrage from millions of users who had legitimately used the service to …

As the Google I/O conference gets underway in San Francisco, a Google-backed start-up has launched a cloud solution which aims to eradicate vendor lock-in.

Cloud management providers CliQr Technologies has launched CloudCenter, a product which “enables applications to get to and fluidly move between clouds with optimal price-performance and without migration disruption and expense”.

The product will have an official unveiling at the Google I/O conference, with both Google Ventures and Foundation Capital providing venture capital for the start-up.

CloudCenter consists of two key products; Orchestrator and Manager. Orchestrator is an enabling technology which allows software to move effortlessly across different cloud providers, while Manager is an optimisation software allowing users to manage every aspect of their cloud applications through an intuitive dashboard.

Gaurav Manglik, CliQr CEO, stated his belief that the promises of on-demand resources and elasticity that cloud computing offers may now start to be fully …

There’s no such thing as too little cloud research from Gartner, and this is more interesting news for cloud users: Gartner forecasts that more than a third of consumers’ digital content will be stored in the cloud by 2016.

Gartner’s research is of course widely accepted as one of the most authoritative in the business, so this will come as another welcome trend, especially given that consumers only store seven percent of their content in the cloud now.

“With the emergence of the personal cloud, fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from connected devices,” said Shalini Verma, principal analyst at Gartner.

Cloud storage, in the ‘post PC’ era, is one of the most alluring aspects of consumers’ cloud adoption, and especially with user content growing at an inordinate rate, the cloud appears to be the obvious place to meet those needs.

Gartner therefore predicts that the …

With Google’s developer conference due to kick off this week, rumours are afoot that the internet giant is preparing to announce the launch of an expanded batch of cloud services.

Google I/O opens on Wednesday in San Francisco, and a number of leading industry commentators have reported that the company will announce a new IaaS offering, in addition to its existing App Engine and Google Cloud Storage facilities.

On Friday GigaOm cited ‘multiple sources’, claiming that Google was planning to launch a competitor to Amazon’s successful EC2 IaaS service. Such a service was rumoured to be in the pipeline back in May, but wasn’t initially expected until the end of this year.

If the rumours are correct, the launch would mean Google going head to head with both Amazon and Microsoft, which is also believed to be preparing an IaaS cloud offering that would constitute a …

There’s data. And then there’s BIG DATA.

Many of us have been bombarded with the term in many frameworks. There are some professionals that chalk it up to marketing hype or meaningless buzzword.

Personally, I prefer the way Gartner categorises it. That it is more than size. It is a multi-dimensional model that includes complexity, variety, velocity and, yes, volume.

But the pressing issue with this definition of Big Data is how best to secure something so vast and multifaceted. If you recognise the old concept of a network perimeter is antiquated and dangerously narrow, there should be some concern as to corralling all this data and ensuring its transit and storage is protected.

The latter issue speaks directly to compliance needs. Banks and other financial institutions, medical facilities, insurance, retailers and government entities are especially sensitive to the compliance requirements.

However, if your business doesn’t fit …

What is cloud computing? We recently asked a number of people in our industry, and got back a range of interesting, and sometimes self-referential, responses. According to our respondents, cloud computing means anything from a single-tenant, multi-user application cloud (also known as software-as-a-service or “Saas”) to multi-tenant, general purpose, on-demand clouds (sometimes called platform-as-a-service or “PaaS”).

I think the world of computing, generally, is moving away from a do-it-yourself approach to accomplish “shared” computing (and by computing is meant anything having to do with servers, in general) towards embracing or, better, stepping into the cloud for most computing the isn’t on the edge of the network.

The migration has begun from dedicated, collocated servers to the cloud. Buyers don’t want to take possession of servers, routers, switches, network drops, racks; they want this from the cloud.

But what is the cloud?

What sort of cloud computer(s) should …

The annual North Bridge Venture Partners survey into cloud computing trends has revealed that more and more companies are starting to get their heads around cloud as a concept, among other findings.

The survey, entitled ‘2012 Future of Cloud Computing’, utilised supporting evidence from major players such as VMWare and Microsoft and is in collaboration with the 451 Group.

Now in its second year, the survey also noted that whilst software-as-a-service (SaaS) is still the leading service used, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) will gain significantly in the next five years.

North Bridge asked 785 cloud professionals – including vendors and industry experts – about a wide range of issues impacting cloud computing, with certain trends noticeable.

Most importantly, 50% of respondents said they were “confident” that “cloud solutions are viable for mission critical business applications” – in other words, they don’t think the cloud will fail them for their business, despite …

Following Gartner’s recent report on what it sees as the five key trends that will shape cloud computing strategies between now and 2015, here is my perspective on the impact cloud computing will have on an SME audience.

Gartner’s trends tend to focus on the larger organisations, typically 5000 seats and above, yet in the UK 99% of businesses are sub-250 employees and will have different requirements, benefits and considerations when looking to utilise a cloud platform. 

Many customers are still confused about what the ‘cloud’ is and what all the hype and terminology means to them in real terms.

Having spent a great deal of time in discussions with such customers at events and meetings, I continue to find a lack of understanding and clarity past the surface level of the cloud being internet based.

Most cannot explain SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, private and public clouds, yet know …

This is a potentially alarming finding from the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency (IWGCR): a combined 568 hours of downtime at 13 major cloud providers has cost £45.8 million (or $71.7 million) in business since 2007.

In the report, entitled “Downtime statistics of current cloud solutions”, IWGCR analysed the 13 providers, including Amazon, Microsoft and PayPal among others, and worked out that on average, cloud services were unavailable for 7.5 hours per year.

Turning it around, it means that cloud services are available 99.917% of the time – a comparatively huge difference from the oft-feted figure of 99.999% availability.

There has been plenty of scepticism concerning the supposed ‘five nines’ over the years, and this report may go some way to providing concrete evidence that 99.999% availability is a myth for now.

To put it into context, nPhaseOne notes that with ‘five nines …