Cloud computing vendors need to band together to create rules on privacy and security or face the prospect of having the U.S. Congress pass regulations, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith said Wednesday.

It’s been a busy few days for the whole idea of networked hard drives that provide direct Internet connections so you can get to them from everywhere. Last week, Seagate introduced DockStar, a $99 add-on for its FreeAgent Go drives that provides browser-based access to their contents. And today Netgear launched Stora, an all-in-one network drive with Web access.

Amazon Web Services has expanded a shipping service for large data sets on its S3 cloud storage platform so customers can get their content back instead of just sending it.

Users are set to ditch tape as a storage medium as one in 10 businesses have lost data following a failure of a tape backup system.

EMC Corp. Tuesday unveiled a high-end Symmetrix storage array that is based on Intel Corp.'s x86 quad-core processors and integrates VMware's APIs to automate the provisioning of storage for virtual machines across multiple tiers of disk drives, from solid-state to SATA.

The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has formed the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group, which will develop standards, interfaces and best practices for storing data in the cloud, it announced on Tuesday.

Needing to better deal with 50 billion files worth of photos, engineers at Facebook are installing a new photo storage system they say is 50% faster than traditional systems.

EMC expects demand for its Mozy online backup service to continue growing, despite the challenging business environment and weak consumer demand, the company's top executive said.

Online storage sites, the toast of the Internet circa 2006, are shutting down in droves, putting the data and images of their users in jeopardy.