On the heels of some big leaks over the past weekend about alleged features coming to the next version of Microsoft’s cloud storage service, the Windows Live team has gone public with early information as to what’s happening.

As some Microsoft watchers expected after seeing some alleged new Skydrive screen shots posted on February 18 by Gemind.com.br, Microsoft is moving toward combining its Skydrive and Live Mesh services with the next release of Skydrive. (Live Mesh is Microsoft’s Dropbox-like sync service that the company first announced in 2008.)

Up until now, SkyDrive has been little more than a Web site where users can save, share and access files and data. The SkyDrive team plans to turn it into more of a real service that will supplement Windows 8, according to a February 20 post on the Building Windows 8 blog.

Read the full report HERE!

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. 

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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!