Microsoft has posted an update for its SkyDrive cloud storage service on iOS.

The company said that the update would add support for Apple’s latest hardware releases as well as interface and performance enhancements.

With the 3.0 release of SkyDrive for iOS, users will now be able to install the application on their iPhone 5 handsets and iPad Mini tablets.

Microsoft said that while it has seen strong uptake for SkyDrive on Windows, it is looking to increase the service’s reach with other platforms as well.

“With the release of Windows 8 and Windows RT back in October, more and more people every day are using SkyDrive for their most important files through the SkyDrive app, as well as through SkyDrive integration in File Explorer,” Microsoft SkyDrive Apps group program manager Mike Torres wrote in a blog post.

“Of course, there are great SkyDrive experiences for Windows devices, but being the place for all your files means we invest a significant amount of effort ensuring you have a great experience across all the devices you want to use.”

In addition to the expanded iPhone and iPad support, Microsoft is adding a number of performance and interface enhancements. IOS users will now be able to download either full resolution photos or smaller-sized images to either iPhones or iPads. Additionally, the service will add support for image metadata on uploaded images and will improve support for third-party applications.

Microsoft said that the latest version of SkyDrive for iOS can be downloaded through the iTunes App Store.

Google Apps for Business users have been given the opportunity to get QuickOffice for Android and the iPhone.

Quickoffice allows users to edit Excel, Powerpoint, and Word documents and save them to their Google Drive clouds. Companies that use Google Apps for Business are allowed to use the program for free. Until recently, the software suite was only available for the iPad.

“Google Apps for Business can already edit Microsoft Office files using Quickoffice on an iPad, and starting today they can do the same on iPhone and Android devices,” wrote Quickoffice Product Manager Mark Beaton in a blog post.

“From Word to Excel to Powerpoint, you can make quick edits at the airport or from the back of a taxi and save and share everything in Google Drive.”

Quickoffice is a mobile productivity suite that Google bought the rights to last year. The suite is offered as a part of the Google Apps for Business program. Google’s enterprise offering is a monthly charged productivity offering that gives user’s access to Google Apps and storage.

The Quickoffice news comes as Google continues to attempt to entice businesses over to its selection of Google Apps. Over the past few years the search giant has been attempting to find converts for its cloud-based productivity software.

Google has started pushing its Chromebook devices as a high-end offering. The Chromebook Pixel is a pricey touchscreen laptop that runs the Chrome OS. Google’s released the device with Quickoffice pre-installed.

Recently Microsoft also joined the push towards cloud apps with the launch of Office 365. Redmond’s software saw an update last February that brought it expanded integration with enterprise social networking tool Yammer.

Google Apps for Business users can currently grab a copy of Quickoffice for Android in the Google Play Store starting now. iPhone users can also pick up the app in Apple’s App Store.

Backup specialist PHD Virtual is building on its enterprise backup operation with the acquisition of VirtualSharp.

The company said that the acquisition would bolster its disaster recovery options by offering users better choice in scheduling and managing backups.

Founded in 2005, PHD Virtual specialises in backup services for virtualisation and cloud computing services. The company has expanded its services in recent months to cover VMware, Citrix and OpenStack cloud deployments.

Joe Noonan, senior product manager for PHD Virtual, told V3 that the acquisition of VirtualSharp would bolster the company’s own disaster recovery holdings.

“Those were some areas where our products and other products fall short,” Noonan explained.

“What VirtualSharp is offering is disaster recovery assurance.”

The company said that it will integrate VirtualSharp’s products and staff into its own operations, but the brand and services will continue to be offered.

By integrating the VirtualSharp disaster recovery brand into its backup line, PHD believes that it can offer its large enterprise and service provider partners with disaster recovery services which can be tested multiple times to provide customers with more assurance that their backup instances will be available and compatible in the event of a disaster.

“A product like this allows you to test much more frequently,” Noonan explained.

“They can prove to you that not only is your disaster recovery plan working, but the objectives you set with them can be met.”

Yahoo has announced that its email client now offers integration with Dropbox’s cloud.

The partnership will allow users to send, share, and manage email attachments using Dropbox. Yahoo’s latest integration comes as the firm continues to revamp its product offerings.

“Email attachments can be tricky: they’ve got file size limits, you can’t keep them updated, and when you add people to a thread, attachments are the first to get left behind,” wrote Dropbox product designer Joshua Jenkins in a blog post.

“The Yahoo Mail team decided to fix this – by integrating with Dropbox.”

Starting immediately Yahoo Mail will support integration with Dropbox. The rollout will start with integration for Yahoo Mail versions in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish languages.

The integration allows users to send and receive files larger than 25MB. Integration supports the ability to save doc, picture, and video files.

For Yahoo the integration catches the company’s email client up to competitors such as Gmail and Outlook. Both Google and Microsoft web-based email clients offers support for cloud storage.

The Dropbox integration is unique for Yahoo as Dropbox does not own the cloud storage provider. Google and Microsoft created both Google Drive and SkyDrive for use with their email platforms.

Yahoo has been working to update their product portfolio over recent months. The team at Yahoo recently updated its Homepage. Yahoo also recently bought mobile app Summly for $30m.

Dropbox has been making waves over the past few months as well. Late last year the firm brought two-step authentication to its cloud offering. The security update came following a massive data breach suffered by the company last August.

Peer 1 Hosting has taken the wraps off mission critical cloud computing services for enterprise customers, offering availability up to 99.999 percent (five nines) plus built-in disaster recovery from its global network of datacentres.

Announced at the Cloud Connect conference in Santa Clara, Mission Critical Cloud is based on Tier 3’s cloud computing platform, which itself uses VMware technology but with its own orchestration and management layers.

The result is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering capable of meeting reliability requirements for hosting enterprise applications in the public cloud, Peer 1 claims.

“We wanted to provide our customers with choice in respect to cloud. If I’m an enterprise user, I want an environment that mitigates risk, and has more robust service level agreements of four or five nines,” Peer 1’s worldwide GPU cloud specialist Richard Rivera told V3.

The firm said that Mission Critical Cloud offers high availability by building in local mirroring of virtual infrastructure, plus replication to a second Peer 1 datacentre for redundancy.

“In the event of a failed node or failed hypervisor, that stack would quickly be up and running again in another location,” Rivera said.

However, this capability is only offered in the Enterprise version of the service, not the Standard version. The Enterprise version also offers an SLA of five nines, while the Standard is set at four nines.

Customers can also choose a specific datacentre location from Canada, the UK or Germany for hosting their applications.

Mission Critical Cloud offers customers a self-service portal, with the ability to provision infrastructure using Blueprints. These templates contain everything required to stand up an enterprise application, including specifications for a virtual server or group of servers and the supporting infrastructure, according to Rivera.

However, with recent high-profile outages experienced by the likes of Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), enterprises are likely to be wary of putting any more vital infrastructure into the public cloud.

But Peer 1 said it is in a different position to those cloud providers, as it owns the end-to-end infrastructure.

“We own and operate our own FastFiber 10Gbit/s wide-area network and the datacentres we reside in, so we are able to manage the upstream and downstream of that entire network, which is how we can offer those very strong SLAs,” Rivera said.

Peer 1 is also looking at offering hybrid environments, combining the public cloud with dedicated physical infrastructure for hosting the most critical elements of a customer’s infrastructure, such as clusters of SQL servers, he added.

The Peer 1 Mission Critical Cloud is available under pay-as-you-go pricing, but exact tariffs have yet to be released by the firm.

A survey from the Linux foundation has found that 80 percent of enterprises plan to increase their Linux server deployments over the next five years.

According to the report, the adoption of the cloud in business circles is a major reason for the planned increases. The Linux Foundation says that increase deployment of Linux is starting to put a dent in Microsoft server sales.

Those surveyed reported that they were more likely to deploy Linux servers than Microsoft servers over the next five years.

The Linux Foundation’s report found that only 20 percent of those surveyed plan to increase the number of their Windows servers over the next five years.

That figure is in comparison to the 80 percent of respondents who plan on increasing their Linux server deployments over the same time frame.

A key reason for the lack of Windows deployments may be because of the recent release of Windows 8. According to the study, 39 percent of survey respondents say they are moving away from Microsoft because of the latest version of Windows.

Cloud computing was reported to be another key reason behind Linux adoption. The report found that 76 percent of cloud-enabled companies surveyed were using Linux servers to run their cloud.

“Cloud computing is a natural fit for Linux, as it depends on openness, and is an area where Windows is struggling,” the group wrote in its report.

The Linux Foundation found that the three main causes for the increase in Linux use were technical superiority, lower total cost of ownership, and security.

Reasons for enterprise’s hesitation to join the Linux community included lack of features, driver availability, interoperability, and the dearth of qualified workers trained in Linux.

The Linux Foundation reports that survey participants inability to find Linux trained staffers has increased by 11 percent year-over-year.

The study results come from a crop of survey responses from 1,279 businesses. About 355 of survey respondents make over $500m in annual revenue or staff over 500 employees.

A judge has dismissed a patent claim against Rackspace involving the patenting of mathematical algorithms.

Rackspace and its partner Red Hat got the case thrown out on the grounds that mathematical algorithms could not be patented. The case reportedly marks a major victory for the open-source community.

“This is a major victory for open source software,” said executive vice president and general counsel of Red Hat Michael Cunningham in a statement.

“We are gratified to have beaten another patent for open source and for our customer. We also believe that the thoughtful dismissal by Chief Judge [Leonard] Davis [will] encourage earlier decisions by other courts on invalid software patents, reducing vexatious litigation by non-producing entities and their corrosive effect on innovation.”

The case involved Rackspace and Red Hat fighting in court over a specific algorithm found in Red Hat’s flavor of Linux. Red Hat legally assisted Rackspace in the case because the firm uses its version of Linux in some of its products.

US firm Uniloc accused Rackspace of illegally using its patent, #5,892,697, for use in its products. Uniloc was hoping to receive damages from Rackspace based on the indiscretion.

However, Chief Judge Davis ruled that Uniloc’s patent claim was invalid. The judge based his decision on a Supreme Court ruling which finds that mathematical algorithms are not patentable.

The court’s ruling comes in the eastern district of Texas. That region has been well-known for often ruling in favor of firms like Uniloc which hold onto patents but don’t openly make anything with them.

According to Rackspace and Red Hat, the case marks the first time that the eastern district of Texas has granted an early dismissal to a patent suit on the grounds that the material in question was un-patentable.

The idea that the case could be a turning point in the battle against patent trolls is also shared by Mark Webbink, executive director of the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School. Webbink wrote in a blog post at Groklaw that the importance of the case could not be emphasized enough.

“The importance of this case cannot be underscored,” Webbink wrote.

“It demonstrates that a court that has been favored by patent plaintiffs for years recognizes that there are some really bad patents out there, and the court is not going to hesitate to throw them out at the first opportunity.”

The courts ruling could play favorably to future cases involving patent trolls. Patent related cases involving non-producing entities have continued to hurt open-source innovation in a variety of fields.

Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) took the fight to patent trolls in the 3D printing industry. The advocacy group called on the public to help uncover patents that failed to meet proper legal standards.

Researchers have uncovered thousands of misconfigured Amazon S3 storage buckets, making it possible to obtain access to potentially highly sensitive company data.

In the tests, penetration testing firm Rapid 7 was able to access personal photos from a social media service, a car dealership’s sales records and account information, firms’ employee records as well as unprotected database backups containing site data and encrypted password.

According to Will Vandevanter, senior security consultant at Rapid 7, the firm was able to access the information having identified more than a thousand publicly accessible Amazon S3 storage buckets.

Firms typically use Amazon’s S3 system to store static content such as server backups, company documents, web logs, and publicly visible content such as website images. The files in S3 are then organised into so-called buckets.

“Although a file might be listed in a bucket it does not necessarily mean that it can be downloaded. Buckets and objects have their own access control lists,” Vandevanter wrote on a company blog.

Firms that had stored their data insecurely in S3 could be set for a rude awakening, he warned.

“Much of the data could be used to stage a network attack, compromise users accounts, or to sell on the black market.”

Typically, Amazon would make S3 buckets private, so the public ones are likely to be the results of users misconfiguration, said Vandevanter. 

Nonetheless, Amazon Web Services makes it easier for would-be hackers by using a URL structure that is easy to guess, making it child’s play to access public buckets.

“Checking if a bucket is public or private is easy. All buckets have a predictable and publicly accessible URL,” he added.

Having identified hundreds of public buckets, Vandevanter and his colleagues took a random sample to check which buckets had accessible content.

They discovered more than five million accessible text documents, many of which where marked ‘private’ or confidential.

AWS told V3 there were many legitimate reasons users might choose to leave buckets open, but in cases where customers were unsure, it did its utmost to work with them to secure their data.

“AWS Support staff regularly reach out to customers who may have potential configuration issues with AWS, to assist those customers with achieving better efficiency, reduced costs, or in some cases, to remedy their security configuration and posture, for S3 and other services,” a company spokesman told V3.

Amazon has unveiled a security platform aimed at improving protections for its AWS cloud computing platform.

The company said that the CloudHSM platform would allow users to purchase use of dedicated security modules which can encrypt AWS instances to prevent unauthorised access.

Under the CloudHSM plan, customers can purchase use of the hardware modules which generate and store encryption keys. The keys are then used to encode and decrypt the data stored in AWS instances. The keys themselves will only be available to the users, providing additional protections.

Amazon said that while it works to secure every AWS instances, some customers have sought out additional protections. To provide more security and to comply with certain regulations regarding data storage and security, the company said that it needs to offer the heightened protections of a service such as CloudHSM.

“Until now, organizations’ only options were to maintain data in on-premises datacentres or deploy local HSMs to protect encrypted data in the cloud,” Amazon said in announcing its new service.

“Unfortunately, those options either prevented customers from migrating their most sensitive data to the cloud or significantly slowed application performance.”

Security worries have long plagued the adoption of cloud computing services. While vendors themselves have sought to dismiss such concerns, many organisations have listed fears of data breach and unauthorised access among their chief concerns for cloud migration.

Oracle continues to struggle to sale servers. Earlier this month the firm reported that third quarter revenue for its servers were down 23 percent year-over-year. Overall the company failed to compete with competitors with only a four percent market share.

The Larry Ellison led company has failed to find the secret sauce necessary to interest firms in its line of hardware. Oracle inability to compete with rivals has really hurt the company’s bottom line over the past few years.

While the company recently launched a new line of Sparc T5 and M5 servers, it is yet to be seen if that will be enough. Even if the servers turn out to be amazing, Oracle’s real problem is its strategy of designing entire systems for only Oracle gear.

The firm runs on the idea that by doing it all themselves they can create the best systems. Not to mention, build out platforms that require all-Oracle software and hardware.

Unfortunately, for Oracle the hardware industry no longer works without some form of corporation. Take HP for example, its Pathfinder program sees the firm working with other tech firms to create ARM servers for its Project Moonshot program.

The program sees HP co-developing servers with hardware and software vendors. HP’s approach is different from Oracle’s in that it aims to build servers that are not so closed and proprietary.

Oracle still exists on an old way of thinking. The firm believes that a business can get away with offering a proprietary system. But in today’s infrastructure that is not true. Users want choice and the ability to not be bogged down by a single option.

HP will need to focus on open platforms if it wants to turn things around. And under Meg Whitman it looks like its going that way. Project Moonshot is a good example of a new paradigm that HP is creating. Overtime that paradigm shift could mean big things for the firms ability to take some of Oracle’s business.

Things at HP and Oracle are both quite bumpy at the moment. But one firm is making the smart move (at least when it comes to servers). HP sees a future more in line with what smaller firms like Salesforce are doing. Oracle, however, is struggling to adapt.

The idea that Oracle doesn’t “get it” isn’t necessarily anything new. Salesforce chief executive and Larry Elision’s mortal enemy Marc Benioff said something similar back in 2011. But Ellison and Oracle still don’t get it.

HP is adapting, even IBM is adapting, but Oracle just doesn’t get it.

27 Mar 2013