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HP has unveiled a trinity of technologies that it claims will allow businesses to further benefit from their current cloud computing solutions.

HP hopes that it will offer improvements in the form of cost-cutting, risk management and improved flexibility within cloud platforms.

The firm has created the new services in the light of a new study it conducted which found that uncertainty within many enterprises over the future of IT technology was fuelling hesitancy. It also identified that most companies would be more likely to invest in cloud computing if they could be assured it was a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to their current in-house systems.

The survey identified that 90 per cent of all those questioned were unsure as to how the future of business computing would unfold. HP then revealed that this resulted in 75 per cent of respondents expressing a desire to invest in anything which would add a greater degree of certainty to the equation, as well as offering a more flexible working environment.

HP’s software solutions VP Thomas E. Hogan commented that despite understanding the benefits of cloud computing, most business IT managers were looking for a solution which would remove any risk associated with switching to the remote platform.

Mr Hogan said that the new range of services from HP would help to ease companies into the adoption of cloud computing by balancing risk against cost and generating faith in the platform within firms.

One of the new HP cloud-based services, called Cloud Assure, is intended to help businesses manage the costs of cloud computing. This includes being able to ensure that the minimum terms of service that a cloud provider has promised to uphold are indeed being met.

The HP Operations Orchestration service allows for automatic scaling of cloud capacity and relies on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud.

All of these new services are a step in the right direction and should hopefully attract more enterprises to cloud solutions by generating confidence and trust in the technology and its providers.

A Ministry of Justice investigation has found that EDS had lost data on prison staff twelve months before noticing the breach.

According to Jack Straw, Justice Minister, the HP subsidiary will undergo an annual audit of its security and pay the cost arising from the loss which also includes retraining.

The Ministry�s investigation into the data breach that was announced in September revealed that the incident could affect nearly 5,000 staff as the hard drive contained �256 items of sensitive personal information� which has the potential to cause a lot of damage if leaked. The data included information like addresses, dates of birth, bank details and national insurance numbers.

Straw also added that there was no indication that the information has entered the public domain. Investigations revealed that data was downloaded to a hard drive as a part of data recovery exercise in July 2007. The disk was not cleaned before it was taken out from the site.

Online data storage protects information from leaking by limiting the access. Online data storage also makes the use of traditional storage devices like CDs, DVDs etc redundant and hence reduces the chances of data theft or loss. Companies and government organisations should use the best available technology to secure their data.