WPC 2010 Updates for Cloud Hosting Providers.   Microsoft re-newed its commitment to helping cloud service providers deliver cloud services through its software, services and programs, which enable them to become trusted advisers and full-service IT providers to businesses.

Highlighted so far has been this statement; “Microsoft sees service providers becoming more important as the cloud becomes more predominant,” Microsoft communications sector worldwide hosting general manager John Zanni said in a statement. “Given their experience in deploying and selling infrastructure and software as a service, businesses will depend on them for IT as a service. The next step for service providers is to look beyond their current hosted offerings to become full-service IT providers and trusted advisors to businesses.”

They have been talking a lot about how managed hosting provider nGenX was able to work with the Dynamic Data Center Toolkit (Microsoft cloud hosting software) and NetApp to include enterprise-class disaster recovery in its automated cloud service, Guardian GeoCloud.  “A major concern of cloud computing among our customers is reliability, as downtime or lost data translates to lost revenue, a damaged reputation and halted productivity,” said Robert A. Bye, executive vice president at nGenX. “By integrating disaster recovery into Guardian GeoCloud, we are able to achieve the reliability that our customers demand, providing replication and failover of their virtualized environments to a remote datacenter. Moreover, our customers now have access to a level of disaster recovery and security traditionally only available to large enterprises, at a fraction of the cost.”