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.”

At the Best of Breed Conference on October 25-26th, I had the privilege of listening to Larry Bonfante, CIO of USTA discuss how the position of IT has shifted from utility provider to the role of "trusted advisor/business enabler.” He mentions how to utilize technology to drive brand, revenue, and engage consumers. This topic points to the fact that CIOs must be business leaders and just not technologists. So, how can you make a difference? He answers, “By understanding your

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.

Know what you are backing up and know what you need to back-up.
They are not always the same thing.

During the course of writing this series of blogs on backup and disaster recovery I thought I would throw in a few anecdotal stories along the way. I just got out of a meeting with one of my key managers. We were talking about a long time client and a huge backup problem that was just uncovered.

We are winding down 2010. As I look back at the recent months to assess the trends for 2011, one thing stands out most prominently. That one thing is the VCIO or the Virtual Chief Information Officer. While I don’t particularly like that term, it is perhaps the most intuitive description for someone who serves in a part-time contract role as the CIO for small to mid-size businesses.

From my vantage point, I see three primary drivers behind the increased demand for IT experts serving in the role. Those three drivers are...