After a major cloud computing partnership with Microsoft with in December, NetApp has now announced a comprehensive set of management tools to enable service providers to build private and public clouds for both storage and virtualization customers.   The latest products from NetApp not only enhance functionality in providing services and apps for enterprise clients, it bolsters functionality and security for IT service provider cloud deployments for their customers.  "NetApp has a proven track record of successfully teaming with leading service providers to power their cloud service offerings," Patrick Rogers, NetApp's (NASDAQ: NTAP) vice president of solutions and alliances, wrote in a statement. "Our strategy in this space is to enable the success of our solution partners, not compete with them, and through them provide a broad and open set of industry cloud services for enterprise IT customers."

Symantec CEO Enrique Salem spoke at the 2010 RSA Conference and called for the need to provide a new level of security as data in the cloud is made available to a host of mobile devices.   Salem said that enterprise data has a 60% annual growth rate which needs robust security to be protected from cybercriminals.  "IDC says there will be one billion cell phones accessing the Internet by the end of this year. Right now, there are 1.3 billion PCs connected to the Internet. We need to think about how we secure that device," he said as he spoke to an audience at this week’s RSA conference. Salem said that cybercriminals know the value of intellectual property and there is a shift away from broad based attacks to precision attacks on specific targets.

Google has added the Picnik photo-editing to its string of recent acquisitions.   The price paid for the small company was not disclosed.    Google already owns Picasa which it bought back in 2004, which offers some similar photo organizing and enhancing features.    Picnik further enhances Google’s abilities with the service which supports the ability to import photos from Flickr, owned by Yahoo, as well as from Facebook.   "Picnik [is] one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud," Brian Axe, product management director at Google, blogged. "Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your Web browser.  The first step will be integration of the product with Google.

A Federal U.S. judge has granted Microsoft’s request for a court order against one of the most infamous sources of internet spam the Waledac botnet, while will allow it to cut of 277 associated domains.   The action is expected to wipe out the command and control servers utilized by cybercriminals to control hundreds of thousands of infected PCs.  It is most commonly believed that Waledec botnet is the work of Eastern European spammers which is capable of generated 1.5 billion spam messages per day.