The FBI is taking a tough line on cloud vendors looking to do business with U.S. law enforcement agencies, saying Tuesday that there would be no compromise in its new rule that all such services comply with the agency’s Criminal Justice Information Systems (CJIS) security requirements. The FBI knows some vendors may have a tough time meeting those requirements, but it says that’s the price of doing business with federal law enforcement.

“The FBI remains committed to using technology in its information-sharing processes, but not at the sacrifice of the security of the information with which it has been entrusted,” Stephen Fischer Jr., a spokesman for the FBI’s CJIS division, said on Tuesday in an e-mail to Computerworld.

The move follows the Los Angeles Police Department dropping Google Apps two months ago because it could not comply with the CJIS requirements.

The LAPD and the city attorney’s office ultimately decided, some two years after deciding to move their e-mail systems to the cloud in order to save costs, that no cloud computing solution is really compatible with the federal security guidelines that the departments are required to follow, Cloudline’s Jon Stokes wrote at the time.

Wired has the story HERE!

Well now.. this might be interesting and could also be a HUGE money maker for MS.

This headline is not an error. I didn’t have one too many craft brews over the New Year’s weekend.

Microsoft is poised to enable customers to make virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, I’ve heard from a handful of my contacts who’ve asked not to be identified.

What does this mean? Customers who want to run Windows or Linux “durably” (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so. Microsoft is planning to launch a Community Technology Preview (CTP) test-build of the persistent VM capability in the spring of 2012, according to partners briefed by the company. 

Read the entire article...

As we fasten our seatbelts and take off for the cloud, we must be mindful of who’s flying the plane. That’s the message from a study to be released today by Nasuni Corp., which concludes that only six of the leading 16 cloud storage providers are ready for primetime.

Since April 2009, Nasuni has been evaluating the market, testing storage vendors for performance, stability and scalability. The top performers were Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure, the study found. The other services to pass the test were from AT&T, Nirvanix, Peer 1 Hosting and Rackspace.

Which 10 failed? Nasuni spared those names, and for good reason. It wants them to get better, not go away. The Natick, Massachusetts-based startup provides storage technology and services built on top of existing cloud infrastructure. So the more providers in the market the better the competition and the more prices likely fall for Nasuni, which buys cloud storage and bundles in its proprietary technology to then sell to customers.

BusinessWeek has the details HERE!

If you read much about tech, you've undoubtedly been told by some snarky writer that if you're not headed for the cloud, you're hopelessly unhip, behind the times, and probably overweight. You know -- the cloud, that repository of all things digital contained on giant servers owned by someone else out there in cyberspace.

Well, wait a minute. I'm not saying everything about the cloud is hype and bunk. It's not, particularly for businesses that don't need to own and operate infrastructure. But for us regular consumers, the cloud should be seen as a choice for some functions not an absolute must have, much less a measure of your IQ and sex appeal.

The cloud has some real downsides you should know about. Here are some of them, some suggestions of how to do things down here on terra firma, and a few tips on when the cloud really does make sense.

One of the dirty, not-so-secret secrets in techlandia is that vendors want to lock you into their products. Unlike, say, makers of dishwasher soap, who also want to keep your business, but have no way to force you to stay loyal, tech vendors have a club to beat you with. It's an issue that permeates the fundamental nature of the cloud, and you need to watch out for it.

PC World has the details HERE!