Google Inc. may have won the consumer front in the search wars, but the fight is still raging over at the public cloud, where its rivals are competing over who can best help enterprises map out the growing amounts of data they store beyond the firewall. Microsoft Corp. launched the most recent skirmish last week with the addition of a new query language to its infrastructure-as-a-service platform.

The aptly-named U-SQL combines standard relational syntax with elements from the company’s widely-used C# programming language to help lower the learning curve to operationalize cloud-based information for the millions of developers in its ecosystem. The technology is available as a standalone service but is designed mainly to complement the other data management offerings in Microsoft’s cloud.

Not leaving the move unanswered, Amazon Inc. followed up the launch a few days later by rolling out a managed search engine that similarly promises to help organizations find information stored on its rivaling public cloud more easily. Under the hood, the service uses the open-source Elasticsearch technology to handle indexing and relies on complementary projects such as Kibana to provide more advanced functionality like visualization.

But as big of a flash point as search has suddenly become for the major providers, it’s still only one of the many items on the laundry list of challenges that organizations need to address in order to effectively handle the vast volumes of data they keep in the cloud. Topping the agenda is ensuring privacy, which Dome9 Ltd. Security Ltd. hopes to simplify with the $$8.3 million in funding it raised from investors last week.

The capital will help accelerate the development of its namesake policy enforcement service, which helps monitor traffic to and from workloads running on Amazon’s cloud and identify misconfigurations in the underlying infrastructure that could be exploited by hackers. Dome9 has raised a total of $13 million to date.

Photo via lmaresz