MS apologises for cloud outage

Microsoft is apologising to customers for an outage that kept some of its cloud computing users from being able to access their enterprise applications for more than two hours on Monday, InformationWeek states.

"On 23 August, from 5:30am to 7:45am PDT, some customers in North America experienced intermittent access to our data centre.

“The outage was caused by a network issue that is now fully resolved, and service has returned to normal," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail.

Enterprises are latching on to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and projects are moving more swiftly than expected, according to a recent survey conducted by the Yankee Group, CRN says.

The survey found that IaaS, one of the key components of cloud computing along with software- as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service, is taking hold.

And while adoption is still much slower than its SaaS counterpart, the market is gaining traction and IaaS deployments will grow over the next two years.

Open source enterprise software company Red Hat has submitted its cloud platform, Deltacloud, to the Distributed Management Task Force as a potential standard for cloud interoperability, the company said, Reuters writes.

"We do not want Deltacloud to be under the control of any one particular vendor, including Red Hat,” says Red Hat cloud product manager Bryan Che.

“If you want true interoperability and true portability, you need a third-party governance structure."