Sony Ditches Amazon for OpenStack

Rackspace (NYSE:RAX) is no doubt celebrating Sony’s (NYSE:SNE) recent decision to at least partially jump ship from Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ:AMZN) to give the OpenStack cloud infrastructure platform a spin. The Japanese electronics giant is moving part of its PlayStation Network workload to the Rackspace-hosted OpenStack following a huge hacking incident last year, which jeopardized the personal information of millions of Sony gaming network users, reports GigaOM. The security breach was reportedly linked to AWS.

The move is evidence that competition is heating up for AWS, which currently dominates the public cloud industry. It also indicates that price may not be as important for some companies as security and dependability. OpenStack’s services are currently a bit more costly than Amazon’s, but the Sony security breach, along with other AWS glitches, like a significant outage last April, may be giving customers pause.

Last April, Sony discovered that personal data from 24.6 million Sony Online Entertainment accounts may have been accessed, and that information from an older database was also compromised. The breach prompted many to question the safety of cloud computing. Sony said it had no proof that AWS was responsible for the incident.

OpenStack, which recently began beta testing, came into being with the help of NASA two years ago and has the backing of companies including Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ), Dell (NASDAQ:DELL), Citrix (CTRX) and Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO).

To contact the reporter on this story: Gina Smith at staff.writers@wallstcheatsheet.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Damien Hoffman at editors@wallstcheatsheet.com