100TB.com has expanded its network facilities in the region through a partnership with SoftLayer, which owns and operates a world-class data center in Singapore.

New clients will enjoy a hefty 50 percent discount off the first month when selecting a server in the new Singapore facility.

Thomas Hancock, Managing Director, 100TB.com is excited to add a new service location to the existing markets in North America and Europe: "The addition of our new data center in Singapore demonstrates our commitment in making high bandwidth (Web) hosting solutions available to every corner of the market. We are confident that 100TB.com will flourish in Singapore and provide new and existing clients a competitive edge and more opportunities to grow.”

New customers have the added benefit of the company's recently developed on-demand automated platform, which significantly increases the speed of deployment on all servers. Servers can be deployed in minutes, or in 1-2 hours if advanced customization is required.

Hancock, notes that the technology sector in Singapore has grown substantially over the past several years, making it an ideal location for high-tech companies like 100TB.com to set up camp.

OVH acquired real estate that was part of the industrial zone of mining group, Rio Tinto Alcan from the City of Beauharnois, Quebec in January before formalizing plans to construct a new data center with a 360,000 server capacity.

Testing is now underway and a full network launch is scheduled this August, as noted in a Data Center Knowledge (DCK) report.

PEER 1 Hosting is ranked 43 on the 2012 listing, having placed 48th the previous year. Montreal-based iWeb moved from the 120th spot to 107 this year.

More than 10,000 customers worldwide use Vancouver-based PEER 1's IT and cloud hosting services. The hosting leader reported revenues of $33.62 million for the three months ended December 31, 2011, representing a 21 percent rise from the previous 2010 quarter.

iWeb's Web hosting revenues grew to $35 million USD in 2011 and with its focus on continuous expansion the company is expected to improve on that in 2012. Currently, the international push is on the Brazilian market where iWeb's client base has grown from 11 clients in 2006 to nearly 1,100 today. The company recently introduced a cloud hosting service in April 2012.

AgilIT Virtual Private Cloud is a general-purpose IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) which allows Canadian businesses the flexibility to adjust their computing resources on demand, without the expense of buying more hardware or hiring additional IT staff.

Tony Krueck, vice-president of Business Products & Services at TELUS reiterates: "This allows businesses to respond with greater agility to market demands, develop new applications faster, and contain IT costs by subscribing to computing capacity only as needed."

SiteGround plans to lease servers from SoftLayer's data center in Amsterdam. North American Web hosting customers, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of SiteGround's business, are serviced through a Chicago-based data center.

The formal announcement will be made at the seventh Dutch Joomla!Days event at Woudschoten Hotel & Conference Centre in Zeist, The Netherlands, scheduled on April 21-22.

Lilyana Yakimova, Marketing Manager of SiteGround is looking forward to the weekend's activities: "We are excited about sponsoring and participating in this amazing Joomla community event. To meet the Dutch Joomla fans in person and present to them our services, now that they are available on servers located in their own country, is a great opportunity.”

SiteGround is a Diamond sponsor of the event and CEO Tenko Nikolov is on the speaking agenda addressing the pressing issue: Is hosting Joomla on a shared hosting platform a really good idea?

The BizCloud solution, already widely used in Europe, Australia, Asia and the US, gives users all the components required for a private cloud including security and IT management plus the added bonus of adhering to Canadian data governance requirements.

Siki Giunta, vice president of Cloud Computing and Software Services, CSC, said, "There is a model for every organization. Whether you want self-managed or managed service options, or a private, public or hybrid cloud, CSC is following through on our promise to deliver the right cloud, the right way. With CSC, every organization can easily make the initial move to 'as a service' - infrastructure, platform and software on-demand."

The BizCloud solution is built on a Vblock Infrastructure Platform which integrates virtualization software from VMware, networking gear from Cisco and storage and security technology from EMC.

CSC plans to use the 11 Canadian data centers owned and managed by Toronto-based Web hosting provider, Q9 Networks.

Mark Schrutt, analyst from research firm IDC summed it up: "Cloud computing has tremendous promise in Canada. Up to this point, many Canadian businesses have been sitting on the sideline waiting for in-Canada solutions. IDC’s research finds that 60 percent of buyers prefer in-Canada IaaS offerings."

In five years, the IT arm of General Dynamics will honor the two contracts by building a secure, reliable and cost-effective managed service cloud computing platform. Also, a mobile data center solution has to be introduced to help the Army fulfill its contingency operations which require quick computing even if for temporary periods.

Management of network connectivity and maintenance of private cloud operations will also be included as well as designing transportable mobile data centers - fully secure and reliable - that are suitable for harsh conditions and remote locations.

General Dynamics operates four main business segments: Marine Systems, Combat Systems, Information Systems and Technology, and Aerospace. The IT division owns and operates more than 200 data centers in 23 countries and has successfully completed more than 6,000 tactical shelters and containerized systems for the Army.

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Investigators from Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit were joined by US Marshals when the offices of BurstNET Technologies in Scranton, PA were raided in search of compromised computers being used to steal online passwords, bank account numbers and credit card information from thousands of victims.

Microsoft notes that about three million computers in the United States alone are infected with the Zeus malware, which enters a computer with a simple click on a bogus email and continues to record every keystroke, eventually leading to stolen passwords, credit card and account numbers plus other personal information used to make fraudulent purchases or withdrawals. Nearly $100 million has reportedly been stolen through the Zeus botnet since 2007.

Microsoft said that the Web hosts in Scranton and Lombard, IL were targeted to find data and disrupt the Zeus botnet. The raids resulted in the identification of at least 39 individuals who have been accused of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, CAN-SPAM Act, Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

Nearly 800 domains were also secured in the operation and Microsoft continues to monitor them to track other Zeus-infected computers.

That's quite a bit of hardware, software, expertise and infrastructure in two years, but analysts see that as the trend especially in light of global organizations indicating that 35 percent of IT budgets are targeted for cloud services.

"The importance of cloud computing solutions for us came from the e-Government initiative we need to align with. But cloud computing is definitely the key to the future of the Kingdom's IT modernization plan - and the biggest benefit of cloud-based infrastructure is IT resource sharing," said Dr Ayman Fayoumi, Vice Dean for IT at King Abdulaziz University to the Saudi Gazette.

Research firm Gartner reports that IT budgets for CIOs in the Middle East and Africa will increase by 14.3 percent this year. Also, a recent survey by HP and Coleman Research Group found that 85 percent of Saudi companies intend to adopt cloud technologies during 2012.

It might be a great idea for companies interested in obtaining some of the Saudi IT business to attend the Kingdom Cloud Computing Summit, scheduled for April 22-23 in Riyadh.

The Dome9 Lite Cloud service provides centralized firewall management for an unlimited number of servers and clouds whether in a virtual private, cloud, collocated, or hosted environment.

Dome9 said there are 30 million cloud servers in use today and most are vulnerable to attack because their built-in security stacks such as the host firewall are too difficult to manage.

How does Dome9 solve the problem?

Dome9 notes: "Your cloud servers have ports like SSH and RDP left open so you can remotely manage your machine. But this leaves your server vulnerable to any brute force attack or exploit vulnerability. Only Dome9 lets you close these ports, by default, and open them securely on-demand."

You can sign-up and have the service setup in less than five minutes and there's no credit card required, but Lite Cloud customers can seamlessly upgrade to Dome9's Business Cloud with just a few clicks and for just 4 cents per hour per server.

Companies are currently spending 75 percent of their IT budgets to maintain and update infrastructure and hardware, notes IDC. It's widely accepted that the move to cloud computing offsets the need to purchase hardware - and software in many cases - and employing cloud based tools and applications is often far more economical.

"The cloud is going to have a huge impact on job creation,” says Susan Hauser, Microsoft corporate vice president of the Worldwide Enterprise and Partner Group, who commissioned the report. "It’s a transformative technology that will drive down costs, spur innovation, and open up new jobs and skillsets across the globe." In fact, IDC calculates that 1.5 million new cloud jobs have already been created in 2011.

Interestingly, the three industries expected to generate the most cloud-related jobs include: communications and media (2.4 million), banking (1.4 million), and discrete manufacturing (1.3 million).

Furthermore, the report indicates that emerging markets will be the primary beneficiaries of the job explosion with India and China together producing 6.8 million cloud-enabled jobs.

In addition, by 2015 business revenues from IT innovation enabled by the cloud could reach US$1.1 trillion a year - compared to $600 billion generated in 2011 - as companies shift from in-house to offsite systems to process, manage and store data. Both SMBs and larger businesses should benefit equally, the study finds.

Almost 60 percent of SMBs surveyed currently invest less than 10 percent of their budgets in data security even though they are seriously concerned about business data security and integrity.

Furthermore, 74 percent say they have not obtained secure off-site storage for their critical business data, and perhaps more troubling is that 72 percent claim they do not currently monitor or manage their data on a 24x7 basis.