If you’ve been in the IT industry for awhile, you’ve no doubt noticed that it goes through one hype cycle after another.  Many of us witnessed the dot-com explosion, implosion and subsequent MSP market conversion. Watching the cloud hype cycle of the past few years is a little disturbing -- not because I lack excitement about the massive possibilities of distributed computing, utility billing, virtualization advancements and economies of scale; they are large parts of my company’s business model. What bothers me is the extent to which companies will go to make a claim about the cloud. The exaggerations and omissions -- stemming from either ignorance, lack of risk aversion or outright dishonesty -- being used to sell cloud computing and cloud storage services are just nauseating. As an officer of a company competing in this environment, it’s especially hard for me to ignore these problems with cloud storage.

As a computer systems network manager and member of the nonprofit High Tech Crime Consortium, Kevin McDonald has seen all manner of data disasters: the medical company whose patient treatment records were lost in a warehouse fire; the police department whose website host vanished overnight; even the careless employee whose leaky liter of Coke ruined a computer server. “If you are a small business and you have a catastrophic loss of data, more likely than not you will never recover,” says McDonald, executive vice president at Alvaka Networks in Irvine, Calif. “Data storage is so cheap now, if you can’t afford it you should shut your business down and do something else.”

Comedian Gilbert Godfrey lost his job with Aflac for making a joke about the Japanese tsunami. So too did an aide to Mississippi Gov. Hayley Barbour for the same reason. And some government officials and activities are catching criticism for using the crisis to grand stand on their favorite environmental and energy causes.

Irvine-based Tech Coast Venture Network has named Ciaran Foley chairman of the board, replacing Bart Greenberg, who has been chairman since August. 2005. Kevin McDonald is the new TCVN president, a position Foley held for the past year and Greenberg held before that.

Profit acquisition models for security integrators and resellers shifted years ago from selling hardware and software to value-added and managed security services.

Sun VARS: Hurd won't change Oracle's direct-sales focus Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director Published: 17 Sep 2010 E-Mail Print Some Hewlett-Packard VARs might follow former CEO Mark Hurd into the Oracle/Sun camp, saying he could moderate the company's direct-sales focus. [...]

An email snooping scandal at Google has prompted fierce criticism and has worried some enterprise users of its Google Apps service into silence. Google says it takes great pains to reassure customers that it has proper controls over sensitive email data.

Intel's acquisition today of security software vendor McAfee Inc. may create a stir for value-added resellers, according to some channel professionals.

Sheriff Sandra Hutchens has formed a volunteer group of the community’s top technology experts for the purpose of providing advice and consultation to the Department.  The Community Technology Advisory Council (CTAC) will assist in defining the future of technology within the department and identifying areas where improvement and efficiencies can be found. The CTAC is 100% independent and focused on technology and best practices that can improve efficiency and the department’s return on tax dollars invested while maintaining the overall security and reliability of the Systems.