European cloud providers think the U.S. spy scandal will result in more enterprises choosing local alternatives over the likes of Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which, on the other hand, are adamant that they aren't taking part in programs such as Prism.

Security monitoring -- the type involving traditional security information and event management (SIEM) -- can be done in some public Cloud environments, according to Gartner. And if you're using public Cloud services, it's time to think about doing it.

It's become a common scene in the Cloud industry nowadays: Every few weeks or months a Cloud vendor announces a price reduction on its services, and then within a couple of days at least one other competitor announces a price reduction as well. Today, it took just hours.

Amazon Web Services may have just lost out on a $600 million contract to supply cloud computing services to the Central Intelligence Agency, after the federal government upheld a protest that IBM had made related to the awarding of the contract.

After three and a half years in operation, Amazon Web Services' RDS is finally generally available, and users can also get a service-level agreement if they choose to run the database in multiple places.

It's raining money from the clouds as Salesforce.com and IBM this week together spent a total of $4.5 billion to boost their cloud computing services.

Microsoft is cutting prices for many of its Azure services and revamping how it charges for many of its services, the company said during its TechEd North America 2013 keynote.

Microsoft today is showing off improvements to most of its enterprise infrastructure software designed to make it simpler for businesses to deploy hybrid cloud services that can allocate resources as needed.

OpenStack -- co-founded by Rackspace and NASA in 2010 -- certainly has the buzz, what with partnerships with AT&T, HP and IBM, to name a few, all of which have promised to use OpenStack as the base for their private cloud offerings.

Who is Amazon's biggest competitor in the cloud?

Ah, Amazon -- did Jeff Bezos choose that name to symbolize the largest bookstore in the world or did he realize that he would one day create an enterprise Cloud service that was as large and complex as the river basin? After spending some time with his enterprise infrastructure service, I think he saw this coming.

There's been a lot of discussion the past couple of days about an analysis by Guy Rosen, in which he estimates that Amazon Web Services (AWS) is provisioning 50K EC2 server instances per day. He created this estimate by examining EC2 resource IDs and doing a time-series analysis on how much the IDs are incremented per hour.