Another survey has found a sharp increase over the last year in enterprises' plans to migrate toward cloud computing, and this one  adds better pricing to tighter security as a major obstacle hindering faster adoption.

The Tech Pulse survey by Boston marker research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey found 28 percent of 247 survey respondents polled in August had aggressive plans to move to the cloud. A similar poll in early 2009 found 15 percent reporting similar plans. In a measure of how aggressive these plans are, the survey said respondents expected to more than double the workload running on cloud architecture within the next two years.

Do you think you have what it takes to be a good boss? Are you a pushover or a nice guy?

Anyone managing an information technology operation knows that it’s difficult to keep qualified talent. In fact, in the latest member survey from the Society for Information Management ( SIM ), the national organization of chief information officers, employee hiring and retention was listed as the number one challenge for CIOs.

"Because I said so!" has never worked.

I know...30 years ago when your boss told you to do something, you did it. At least those of us in the workforce 30 years ago did. And no, we didn't like it then either. Let's face it, times have changed. Generation X and Y are used to having more control over what they do and when they do it than any other generation of workers before them. They've also been trained to work in a more collaborative environment and are used to receiving immediate feedback and recognition for what they do.

By Danny Lieberman

A metaphor I like to use with clients compares security vulnerabilities with seismic fault lines: As long as the earth doesn’t move – you’re safe, but once things start moving sideways – you can drop into a big hole.

By Anne Field

Data breaches are costing companies globally and in the US a small fortune. And it looks like October had a few humdingers.

Mushrooming data presents the biggest hardware infrastructure challenge for big-company data centers and is fueling plans for growth in data center capacity as well as construction of new centers, according to a new Gartner survey.

Nearly half (47 percent) of representatives from more than 1,000 large enterprises in eight countries placed data growth in their top three challenges in the survey, conducted from June to August in Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Russia, U.S., and the U.K. Most (62 percent) planned to invest in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011 to address the challenge.