Jeff Vance

Cloud computing was clearly a big winner in 2013, and it will clearly remain in the forefront in 2014. In 2014, though, we’ll hear less about the cloud itself and more about other trends it enables, such as Big Data and enterprise social media. I also expect cloud to be considered a mainstream technology by […]

The past year was a good one for Big Data, mostly. Hadoop became a household word (among techie households, that is). Venture capital firms poured money into plenty of Big Data startups, including MongoDB, which locked down a $150-million investment, DataStax ($45 million), MapR Technologies ($30 million), and Skytree ($18 million). And IBM made Watson […]

With any new hot trend comes a truckload of missteps, bad ideas and outright failures. I should probably create a template for this sort of article, one in which I could pull out a term like “cloud” or “BYOD” and simply plug in “social media” or “Big Data.” When the trend in question either falls […]

No one in Redmond can be happy about the latest news out of Apple. Free operating systems? Free Office alternatives? Really? Has Apple lost its mind? Nope. Apple has identified two markets in decline and has woken up to what Google knew a long time ago: traditional shrink-wrap software is dead. Cloud Storage and Backup […]

When your website has become a running joke on late-night talk shows, you know you have a problem. Yet, as CIOs move to cloud architectures, many are worrying that they’ll have a healthcare.gov experience themselves. Of course, website launches fail spectacularly all the time. It’s not uncommon for new apps and sites to crash, hang […]

Much has been written about NSA eavesdropping and the Snowden leaks, but one thing mostly lost in the cacophony of outrage, defensiveness and spin is the fact that cloud computing adoption rate could be significantly lessened, or – worse case – adopters could avoid U.S.-based providers. The Cloud Security Alliance estimates that U.S. cloud providers […]

Shadow IT – IT systems and solutions used inside companies without company approval – is here to stay, and that’s a good thing. It means the business world is embracing new technologies at a rapid clip. Your job now is to figure out how to keep up and add value to the process. Despite the […]

Cyber-security and cyber-criminals are engaged in a constant arms race. The minute a software vulnerability gets patched or a security tool is able to block a class of attacks, malware writers shift gears and look for something new to exploit. For years, security professionals have strived to get ahead of attackers. But the status quo, […]

The cloud may not have quite reached maturity yet, but it’s getting there. Plenty of businesses rely on the cloud for mission-critical applications, and cloud adoption is steady enough in the U.S. that offshore public cloud providers fear they’ll never catch up to Amazon, Google, Rackspace and other cloud providers in the U.S. From outsourcing […]

Hadoop and Big Data are practically synonymous these days, but as the Big Data hype machine gears up, there’s a lot of confusion about where Hadoop actually fits into the overall Big Data landscape. Hadoop is an open-source software framework that stores and analyzes large data sets distributed across multiple off-the-shelf servers. Responsible for much […]