HP Dims the Lights on Its Helion Public Cloud

Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Summary Bullets:

• HP’s fits and starts in the cloud continued this week with its disclosure in a blog that the company will sunset its Helion public cloud offer in January.
• Unable to compete against the hyperscale tier cloud providers, HP is choosing to redouble its efforts in private cloud – and in selling hardware and software to IaaS providers across the public/private spectrum.

HP is making a fast exit from the public cloud sphere. Outmaneuvered by cloud behemoths like AWS and Microsoft which can outcompete HP consistently on price and agility in the IaaS realm, HP has decided to take its Helion public cloud solution off the market in January 2016. In a blog post this week, Bill Hiff, Senior Vice President and General Manager for HP Cloud, said that while HP is committed to helping customers manage their infrastructures across the traditional IT and private and public cloud spectrums, it was time to make a change.

EU Puts Global Businesses on Notice as Safe Harbour is Struck Down

John Marcus

Summary bullets:
• The 15-year old Safe Harbour agreement between the EU and US was effectively thrown out by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU).
• US companies (and all MNCs) are now vulnerable to litigation and loss of customers over privacy concerns.
• While authorities have been tasked with coming up with an alternative by January, that is highly unlikely. Enterprises may need managed security and cloud providers to secure customer data in specific jurisdictions.

October 6 Decision

The CJEU, which interprets EU law to make sure it is applied in the same way in all EU countries, ruled that the Safe Harbour agreement in place for the last 15 years between the European Commission and US authorities did not offer the necessary legal guarantees that it was supposed to have. This ruling erased the quasi-legal framework under which US companies have been handling their EU customers’ data, potentially creating a legal minefield.