Accenture has signed five-year outsourcing agreements with both Banco Popolare Group and Alba Leasing under which Accenture will provide application management and infrastructure services to support the two companies’ leasing operations. Banco Popolare is Italy's fourth largest bank by assets and Alba Leasing is among the country's top 10 leasing companies by new contracts.

Venyu, a technology solutions provider specialising in offsite business continuity, data recovery and data centre solutions, has announced that Kawasaki Motors have selected Venyu RestartIT for seamless data recovery, protection and storage.

Digital Realty Trust, a global provider of data centre solutions, has announced that it has signed a ten-year Turn-Key Datacentre lease with Kelway, the UK's mid-market IT solutions and services provider. The new Turn-Key Datacentre is located in Digital Realty's Redhill facility and will extend Kelway's data centre operations.

IT staff and compliance officials do not see eye-to-eye on cloud security issues and on their organisation’s policies, according to a recent report from Ponemon Institute. In a survey of more than 1,000 professionals in the areas of IT, information security, compliance and privacy, there was some disagreement over who was responsible for defining, implementing and enforcing cloud security requirements for the organisation, researchers from Ponemon Institute wrote in a report.

Fast-food chain YO! Sushi hopes never to buy a server again, according to its IT Manager Billy Waters, and is placing its bets on cloud computing to improve productivity.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, and Virtacore Systems, an industry leader in hybrid cloud services, has announced that Virtacore has leveraged Platform Equinix to support its expanding customer base and world wide growth. Part of Equinix's robust ecosystem of cloud and IT service providers, Virtacore benefits from the ability to quickly and securely interconnect with network and service partners in order to speed the deployment of its hybrid cloud services to enterprise customers.

Equinix, a provider of global data centre services, has announced it has been selected as a data centre partner for customers building and deploying private and hybrid clouds using Rackspace Cloud: Private Edition.

Australian data centres are ill equipped for the move to cloud computing, it has been claimed. A report from Frost & Sullivan, Not All Data Centres are Equal, which was commissioned by Macquarie Telecom, highlighted that the shift towards the cloud and virtualisation technologies can create problems as well as solving them.

Amazon Web Services opened up a new data centre in Oregon that will cost less to use than AWS's other West Coast facility, in California. Businesses can choose to use AWS services including Elastic Compute Cloud, Simple Storage Service, Virtual Private Cloud and many others from the Oregon data centre. The services are priced around 10% less than AWS's Northern California region and about equal to the Northern Virginia region.

French banking group BNP Paribas wants to build two new data centres a Vaux-sur-Sure, in the Belgian province of Luxembourg, Datanews reported. The group chose the site for climactic as well as security reasons.

The 15 year project will be conducted in three phases and will ultimately see the creation of 44.000 sq m worth of data centre buildings, and 70-80 new jobs. The first phase should be operational by 2015. The new centres will serve the entire BNP Paribas group and not only BNP Paribas Fortis.

Source: Telecom Paper

SunGard Availability Services has announced a partnership with the University of Texas at Austin to create a Cloud Computing Research Center.  Through the partnership, SunGard and UT Austin will jointly identify relevant and unsolved research problems in the cloud-computing field, pursue targeted research initiatives to solve those problems and commercialize as appropriate the resulting research.

IO, the leading provider of next-generation modular data centre technology and services, announced today that it has been awarded a contract with Binary Pulse, a leader in private cloud and IT solutions for professional services practices.

As part of the agreement, IO will provide Binary Pulse with Data Center as a Service (DCaaS) at IO Phoenix, delivered through its modular data centre technology platform IO Anywhere.

Data centre services provider BMIT Limited of Malta, a fully owned subsidiary of GO plc, has announced that it will be investing in a cloud platform to enable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. BMIT data centres are housed within two state-of-the-art facilities in Malta, providing a range of colocation, managed and cloud services. One facility is located in Qormi and the cloud facility is at Tal-Handaq.

Colt, Europe's leading information delivery platform, has announced it has appointed value-added distributor, Magirus as its first cloud services distributor. This move represents a new direction for Colt's channel partner programme with the introduction of an IT distributor to its partner community for the first time.

Claranet has launched a new cloud service, with a strong focus on keeping your data in the location you want.

The European Commission believes it is only "logical" that companies providing cloud services over the Internet face audits on whether they are keeping their promises on personal data security. The Commission would like to increase cloud providers' accountability to their users in an upcoming EU "Cloud Strategy", due out next year.

China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) distributed the first batch of cloud computing industry subsidies - totalling RMB 660 million - last month to more than 10 firms involved in 15 pilot projects in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Wuxi.

As organizations wrestle with the challenges of data centre expansion, IT executives are increasingly turning to outsourcing options for expansion and cost control. There are more outsourcing options than ever before, including data centre as a service, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and even cloud providers.

iomart Group, the cloud computing and managed hosting services company, has announced its consolidated half yearly results for the period ended 30 September 2011.

Highlights include: Revenue growth of 36% to £15.4 million, adjusted EBITDA1 growth of 85% to £5.0 million, profit before tax growth of 106% to £2.4 million, basic earnings per share from operations increased by 112% to 2.23p, cashflow from operations of £4.1 million, and net cash at end of period of £3.5 million.  

NextEra Energy Resources’ 100.8MW Minco II wind farm has begun full commercial operation in Oklahoma and is supplying power exclusively for Google’s new Mayes County data centre.

NextEra , the largest wind energy generator in North America, signed a long-term power purchase agreement this spring with Google Energy, a unit of the internet search giant based in California. Financial terms were not released. Google does not disclose power requirements at its data centres.

Source: Recharge News

Global Switch, the leading carrier-neutral multi-tenanted wholesale data centre provider, has officially launched a major extension to its Paris data centre campus.  The project has been delivered on budget and ahead of programme. The new 17,200 sq m building (to be called Paris West) is adjacent to the existing Paris East building creating the city's largest data centre campus of around 52,000 sq m. 

Zayo has announced it will be expanding its fibre network into San Diego, CA. Upon completion, Zayo's network will exceed 400 route miles throughout the San Diego metropolitan area. The new network will extend from the heart of downtown San Diego, north to Oceanside, and east to Escondido. Zayo will provide dark fibre and bandwidth infrastructure services on its San Diego network.

Enterprise data services company Tulip Telecom has announced that it has bagged four large network and data centre orders in the public and private sector worth nearly Rs 200 crore.

Tulip secured a three-year order worth Rs48.88 crore from the Rajasthan government under the central government-funded Rajasthan State Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems project. In addition, it has won a Restructured Accelerated Power Development Reforms Programme project in Bihar worth Rs24.78 crore over five years.