In what appears to be an effort to ease the concerns of EU customers about the security of U.S.-based clouds, Microsoft has launched the Office 365 Trust Center and is offering its customers compliance with the European Commission’s Data Protection Directive. Microsoft claims to be the first cloud provider to sign a set of EU “model clauses,” which are standard contractual clauses that govern the international transfer of personal data. “When included in service agreements with data processors,” Microsoft writes, “the model clauses assure customers that appropriate steps have been taken to hel...

Microsoft’s .NET is coming to VMware’s Cloud Foundry project, an effort to create a standard open source platform for building “developer clouds.”

On Monday, the Bellevue, Washington-based Tier 3 announced that it will contribute code to the project that allows .NET applications to run atop VMware’s platform. At the moment, Cloud Foundry is limited to Java, other JVM frameworks, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Node.js, and PHP.

In essence, Cloud Foundry is a way for developers to build web applications, deploy them to the net, and readily scale them to additional users — without having to worry about t...