Microsoft has wrapped up its massive Hotmail user migration programme.

The company said that it has now transferred all of the user accounts from Hotmail to its Outlook.com service, ending a data transfer campaign which shifted some 150 petabytes of user data.

“When Outlook.com came out of preview in February, it already had more than 60 million active accounts,” wrote Outlook.com group program manager Dick Craddock

“However, Hotmail was still one of the most widely used services, with over 300 million active accounts. This made the magnitude of the process incredible, maybe even unprecedented.”

With the migration complete, Microsoft now estimates that Outlook.com boasts more than 400 million active users. The milestone comes some two months after the company reported that the service was over 60 million users.

Additionally, Microsoft reported that some 125 million of Outlook.com users also use the Exchange ActiveSync service.

To mark the occasion, Microsoft is posting an update for the Outlook.com service. The features will include a new interface option, the ability to send messages from other accounts without an ‘on behalf of’ notification and deeper integration with SkyDrive.

Craddock said that with the new SkyDrive integration, users will be able to more efficiently select and attach files and images from SkyDrve directly into messages.

“When you’re sending an email message, you can select files from your SkyDrive and we’ll automatically turn those into the right thumbnails with links that have the right permissions tied to people that receive the email,” he explained,

“When you insert pictures from SkyDrive, you automatically get a beautiful photo mail. And it’s easy to edit the message, and add or remove files and pictures right from the new message compose experience.”

Businesses moving to the cloud are facing tough challenges around data protection and data use, according to tech giants Philips and insurance firm JLT.

The chief information officer of JLT, Ian Cohen, said the boom of cloud computing services has left the company facing a number of data protection challenges, both with suppliers and customers.

“We operate in a highly regulated environment and trust is vitally important to us,” he said, speaking at a Salesforce customer event on Thursday.

“Not just the implied trust in our brand, but the implied trust that exists between us and our client when we handle their data. And in today’s world increasingly, we are challenged to be explicit about how and where data is accessed.”

Philips vice president Wim Van Gils agreed with this, explaining that the issue of data privacy is particularly relevant to firms using sensitive data.

“We see similar issues with our healthcare business where we’re hit with compliance and a set of security requirements that are enforced by law. When we look at our relationship with consumers we want to be a trusted brand because we’re in the health sector and we never want to compromise that,” he said.

Gils said that many companies’ unwillingness to ask for aid from cloud service providers has caused them to take a misguided, tick-box legal approach to data collection and privacy.

“We want to be very explicit about what information we’re collecting and how we’re using it. Not in some 15-page legal [document] showing what they agree to, we want to bring it up front because we believe it’s one of the foundations of becoming a digital company,” he said. “We need all the help we can get because this is quite new. Most companies are very implicit about it and I think we’re entering an age where we need to be explicit about it.”

Cloud service provider Salesforce’s chief scientist JP Rangaswami said the company is aware of the challenge and is working to create solutions for the privacy problem facing cloud users.

“Data protection is a core concept,” he said. “The phrase people use is informed consent. To get informed consent people need to know what is being collected and how it is being used. The customer needs to be aware of that, they need to know what is being collected.

“This is because it’s not our information. The best we can do is ensure what we hold is solid and that we give our customers the ability to communicate back to their customers.”

However, JLT’s Cohen said that even with the help of bespoke cloud service experts like Salesforce, data privacy issues will continue. “It’s a big issue and Salesforce are helping us but I think there’s more to be done. We need to be even more transparent and to be even more supportive around data privacy, data allocation and data residency and all of these issues.”

The news comes just after Salesforce announced plans to open a new data centre in the UK. The centre will open is Slough in 2014 and is designed to extend the company’s European cloud services.

Oracle has announced an update to its Oracle Secure Global Desktop platform, which enables workers with an iPad or other mobile device to access applications running on Exalogic Elastic Cloud infrastructure.

Available now, Secure Global Desktop 5.0 extends the platform’s back-end support to provide certified access to Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and web-based Oracle applications, including Oracle CRM, the firm said.

In particular, this version has the capability to deliver applications to an HTML5-compliant browser, so users do not need to download and install a software client. This is currently supported only in the Safari browser on the iPad, however.

Wim Coekaerts, Oracle senior vice president for Linux and virtualisation engineering, said: “Enterprise users expect increasingly more mobile access to applications which are often designed to run on desktop PCs. Oracle Secure Global Desktop provides IT with a highly secure remote access solution for such applications, and even full desktop environments, from tablets.”

Oracle Secure Global Desktop is based on technology that Sun Microsystems acquired from Tarantella. It serves up applications or entire virtual desktops hosted in the datacentre to remote users, with Windows PCs, Macs and Oracle Sun Ray Clients already supported as endpoints.

This version also adds support at the back end for servers running Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Linux 6.4, the firm said.

New support on the client side includes Windows 8 and OS X Mountain Lion. Supported browsers now include Internet Explorer 10, Chrome, and Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR).

Amazon has launched a certification programme based on its Amazon Web Services AWS cloud computing platform.

The company said that its AWS Certification Program would seek to provide credentials for developers and administrators looking to oversee the development and operation of AWS cloud and application deployments.

The certification programme will include a series of exams which developers can take at local testing facilities. Upon passing the exams, which include cloud platform architecture, operations, administration and development, the company will issue certifications which verify exppertise in various area of AWS products.

Amazon said that by the end of the year it hopes to be offering ist full range of exams at some 750 testing centres by the end of the year.

The company said that its main goal with the programme was to provide customers a means of verifying that employees were able to properly build and administer their AWS deployments.

“With cloud computing being quickly adopted by organizations of all sizes around the world, in-depth training programs as well as certifications for individuals who have demonstrated competence with AWS are increasingly important,” said Amazon Web Services vice president Adam Selipsky.

“The AWS Certification Program helps organizations identify that the employees, partners and consultants they depend on for their AWS solutions are well-versed in the best practices of building cloud applications on AWS and have the skills to help them be successful.”

Amazon is not the only firm looking to provide training and accreditation to professionals. While the rise in cloud computing has brought a number of new services to the market and given rise to additional fields such as big data analysis, vendors have begun to find themselves facing a shortage of qualified administrators.

Firms such as EMC and IBM have sought to help universities train students on managing their platforms.

At the lower levels, the UK Department for Education is exploring its own initiatives to update and modernise computing curriculum to better prepare students.

Brocade has unveiled a strategy to deliver what it calls the on-demand datacentre through a combination of physical and virtual networking to overcome the limitations of legacy networks.

The company said that by combining physical and virtual networking, users can create a network that reduces complexity and offers scalable virtualisation on-demand.

Brocade claimed that its new initiative will reduce the barriers to entry for companies looking to adopt a software-defined network (SDN) strategy.

“The On-Demand Data Center strategy from Brocade provides an end-to-end solution that spans the physical, virtual and orchestration layers of the datacentre,” Kelly Herrell, vice president and general manager of software networking at Brocade, told V3.

“It brings advanced technologies into play in a pragmatic and evolutionary way, offering a unique path toward software-defined networking (SDN). With Brocade, customers can build upon their current infrastructure investments while moving toward the next evolution in networking.”

Brocade’s strategy aims to create offerings that can use both physical and virtual networking tools. The firm says that the offerings will allow users to mix and match both types of networking options, offering greater flexibility to quickly deploy cloud-based services.

According to the firm, the combination can better handle large-scale multi-tenancy better than legacy networks. Brocade says that the combination allows users to see all servers as a constantly growing shared resources pool.

Brocade also claimed that the combination enables reduced overhead and shorter deployment times through self-service provision models.

Along with the on-demand strategy, Brocade has launched a variety of updated offerings. These include Brocade’s recently announced VCS fabric plug-in. The plug-in offers users the chance to create on-demand provisioning capabilities for OpenStack clouds.

Herrell says that building tools for open networks like OpenStack is an important key in the new era of the market.

“Open network solutions are a new era for the industry. The advantages can be summed up in two words: choice and speed. For choice, openness facilitates solution and vendor interoperability. This allows the customer to select the right tools for the right jobs instead of being force-fed what a single vendor offers,” continued Herrell.

“For speed, this is the benefit gained when open industry collaboration advances technologies faster than what any single vendor acting alone can produce. This naturally improves the speed with which datacentre architecture can adapt to new business pressures.”

Brocade has long been a supporter of open technologies such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight. Herrell says that open initiatives allow for companies to plan for growth in the datacentre and prevents vendor lock-in.

“Customers need to drive their datacentre strategies forward with urgency. They can’t wait; they need to do their architecting and planning now, using the most open and advanced tools they can get their hands on,” continued Herrell.

“Open network solutions such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight are constantly evolving and improving as the ecosystem collaborates on advancing the state of the technology. Importantly, this advancement is being done in an open environment which eliminates vendor lock-in.”

OpenStack has been a major focus on news recently. Red Hat executives recently warned that the platform was the only way to guarantee interoperability between different cloud operators.

Hosting firm SoftLayer has introduced a pay-as-you-go database service based on the open-source Riak NoSQL engine, claiming to offer a turnkey environment for customers developing applications around big data.

Available now, the Riak and Riak Enterprise services have been developed through a partnership between SoftLayer and Basho, creator of the Riak database itself.

The end result combines the high availability, fault tolerance and scalability of Riak with the flexibility and ease of access of SoftLayer’s on-demand infrastructure, the two firms said.

“We are offering the ability for customers to very easily design their own Riak solution via a Solution Designer tool we have produced that makes it easy to order a multi-server configuration,” Marc Jones, vice president of product innovation at SoftLayer told V3.

However, the Riak offering is not strictly a cloud service in the same way as Amazon’s DynamoDB platform, as customers are getting their own dedicated hardware that they can configure how they like using the Solution Designer tool.

“In terms of rapid provisioning, consumption-based billing and the ability to scale, we regard this as being cloud, especially when compared with traditional IT provisioning,” argued Jones.

And while the SoftLayer approach may take longer to provision (up to two hours) than something like DynamoDB, it offers users much greater flexibility in tailoring the infrastructure to an application’s exact requirements.

Customers can choose between small or medium servers, which offer up to four or up to 12 drives respectively, and also specify memory configurations. Local storage options comprise Serial ATA (SATA), Serial attached SCSI (SAS) or solid-state drives, with Raid support for data resilience at each node, while each node is connected by twin Gigabit connections bonded together to provide 2Gbit/s of network bandwidth.

Meanwhile, the Riak Enterprise version of the service offers customers the ability to replicate their database cluster across multiple SoftLayer datacentres around the globe, to serve traffic in multiple regions or simply for disaster recovery and failover requirements.

SoftLayer operates its own private network between its 13 global datacentres, according to Jones, so there is no additional charge for replication traffic. Riak is being aimed at web businesses building applications that may generate a lot of data for analysis, according to SoftLayer, such as gaming sites or social media.

“These are verticals driven in a large part by the data that they capture from their customers, and they are able to derive analytics from this data that ultimately drives their business forward,” said Jones.

SoftLayer is thus aiming to attract customers looking for a robust platform to store their critical data, and such customers could well end up using SoftLayer as their main hosting provider in order to cut network latency between their web tier and the Riak database back-end.

Pricing for Riak starts at $359 (£231) per server per month, while Riak Enterprise is $600 (£386) per node per month or an annual price of $6,000 (£3,869) per node.

Enterprise storage firm Box has announced plans to hire 100 new employees in EMEA and move to larger officers in London as it continues to grow rapidly.

The firm first moved to London last June but has quickly outgrown that space and is now set to move to new offices as part of its plans to hire new staff.

“We have a goal to hire 100 people in EMEA by the end of the year and have already hired 50 employees since we launched last June,” European manager David Quantrell said in a statement to V3.

“This summer, our London team will be moving into a larger facility that caters for 150-plus employees with an option to double the size of the space as we continue to grow.”

The European market is the next major area for Box as it also plans French and German office moves but London is to the remain the hub for the firm’s operations.

“Box is investing millions into its London team expansion and the European market. It’s critical to our success and we’ve centralised our European efforts out of London,” added Quantrell.

The London expansion by Box was first revealed by chancellor George Osborne at an event attended by V3 on Thursday.

Box is becoming a major player in the enterprise market as its storage platform offers a dedicated corporate version of tools such as Dropbox and Google Drive with more security and policy control processes in place.

Earlier this year it announced a sizeable customer win of 50,000 seats from Schneider Electric. V3 interviewed Box chief executive Aaron Levie in the last issue of the V3 Tablet App, which you can download for free simply by registering on the V3 website.

Red Hat is warning businesses that an open cloud approach is the only way to avoid lock-in, claiming that only the OpenStack platform will deliver interoperability between clouds operated by different service providers.

At a roundtable event in London, Red Hat executives outlined their vision for the open cloud and how it can deliver on the hybrid cloud vision where organisations will be free to run workloads on-premise or in the public cloud, as best meets their needs.

Red Hat is enthusiastically backing OpenStack for its cloud offerings, including those for enterprise customers building a private cloud and those aimed at service providers seeking to deliver public cloud services.

“OpenStack is an open framework under which we can realise the dream. We’ve become part of a flourishing community that is developing these standards around cloud governance, because we realise that no single company is going to get us there,” said Red Hat chief technology officer, Brian Stevens.

With Red Hat one of the leading enterprise Linux distributors, OpenStack is an obvious fit for its existing strategy. The firm is following a similar approach to that of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in carefully testing and certifying its build of OpenStack before releasing it to customers as a fully supported product.

Called Red Hat OpenStack, this will be based on the latest Grizzly version of the OpenStack code and follow it by three months, according to Stevens, meaning it is set for general availability in early July.

Meanwhile, Red Hat unveiled this month a parallel community-supported distribution of OpenStack called RDO. This freely available distribution will act as an incubator for upcoming technologies in OpenStack, in the same way that the Fedora Linux build does for technologies destined to be included in RHEL.

Stevens said that Red Hat is seeing as much interest in adopting OpenStack at the service provider level as among its enterprise customers.

“It’s almost impossible to meet a telco now who doesn’t have an OpenStack strategy,” he claimed.

Providers of public cloud services thus seem to be coalescing around OpenStack, save for Amazon and Microsoft who have their own proprietary platforms, plus a small number that are operating VMware-based services.

According to Red Hat, standardising on OpenStack at the enterprise and service provider end will make it much easier to link up the private and public cloud infrastructure to deliver a hybrid cloud strategy.

Amazon is reportedly working to develop a set-top box which would allow the company to serve users with streaming video.

Bloomberg cited company sources in reporting that the firm was working on a branded device which would allow users to access its video streaming services.

The report did not mention what possible services Amazon could offer with the device in addition to its own streaming video platforms. The company currently offers its video player software on a number of home entertainment devices and gaming consoles.

Amazon has given no official word on the development or possible release of the device.

Such a launch could however, put Amazon in direct competition with the biggest names in the home entertainment market. Apple offers its own video services through Apple TV, while the Sony Playstation, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Wii brands also offer support for streaming services including Netflix and Amazon’s own video player.

Outside of the gaming consoles, home entertainment boxes have yet to truly catch on in the market. Apple’s TV box has long been an afterthought in the company’s hardware line, and dedicated streaming boxes such as the Roku player have only begun their mission to crack the consumer video market.

The move could also mark another step by Amazon to transition itself from a web-based retailer and service provider to a hardware vendor and home entertainment heavyweight.

In addition to multi-billion dollar retail service and AWS enterprise operations, the company has built a name for itself in the tablet space with the success of its Kindle tablet line.

Ubuntu developer Canonical has officially announced the latest release of its Linux platform, Ubuntu 13.04, which delivers enhancements for those using the operating system to build an OpenStack cloud.

Available for download from tomorrow, Ubuntu 13.04, codenamed Raring Ringtail, introduces several enhancements on the server side aimed at cloud computing, including integration of the latest OpenStack Grizzly update that was pushed out earlier this month. Other improvements include an overhaul of the Juju orchestration tool, integration with the Ceth open-source storage technology, and an update of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller for software defined networking.

Mark Baker, server product manager at Canonical, told V3 many of the changes introduced in 13.04 are laying the foundations for the next long term support (LTS) release version of Ubuntu, for which Canonical guarantees maintenance and security updates for a period of five years.

“People deploying OpenStack cloud are doing so primarily on the LTS releases, so this release and [the upcoming] 13.10 are really the proving ground to prepare for 14.04 LTS, set for April 2014,” Baker said, although he added that the latest version is a stable build ready for production use.

To this end, Canonical is looking to align Ubuntu’s cloud support around three main priority areas for datacentre users, scale-out storage solutions, networking and compute technology, according to Baker.

For the compute part, Ubuntu integrates OpenStack Grizzly with 13.04 and makes greater use of Juju to enable administrators to deploy OpenStack in a highly available way. This means removing single points of failure, setting up failover for the database components, and adding other redundancy measures. Juju itself also now has a richer GUI that helps administrators visualise the services they are deploying and the relationships between them, Baker said.

For storage, Ubuntu 13.04 also now integrates the Ceph open-source distributed storage system to provide a scalable block, object and Posix-compliant file system.

“We’ve seen interest from our users in operating that as part of OpenStack for object and block storage,” Baker said, explaining that it offers an alternative to OpenStack’s own Swift and Cinder modules but enables both block and object storage on the same platform.

Meanwhile, Ubuntu 13.04 also includes an updated version of the open-source Floodlight OpenFlow controller, designed to control both physical and virtual network switches that support the OpenFlow protocol.

“We’ve been including Floodlight on Ubuntu for a little while, but it’s gone through a bit of an update that is a reasonable step up in terms of functionality and features,” said Baker.

This provides OpenStack users with an open-source alternative to the Nicira NVP technology, which Canonical and VMware recently enabled support for in OpenStack, Baker added.

“This is driven by the desire, as we head towards 14.04 to have more robust open-source options available for people. While Nicira is great technology, it is proprietary, and you have to pay VMware’s prices to use it,” he said.