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This week, we look at a Euroskeptic guide's to cloud security, a paltry forecasted raise for experienced IT pros next year and really, really smatphones by 2017.

If there's one place, you would think Microsoft would dominate the market, it's the desktop, but as Amazon and Google sell the desktop --lock, stock and barrel --in the cloud, Microsoft once again finds itself playing catch up.

Last week the GlassFish was the latest former Sun open source product, Oracle kicked back to the community and ended its support for. It got me thinking whether MySQL users should be worried as it's not the first time Oracle has axed support for a Sun open source product.

Once upon a time if you wanted a server for your project, you begged to IT, and if you were lucky in 6 or 8 weeks, maybe you would have access to it. The cloud changed all that because with a service like Amazon Web Services, you can now provision a low-cost server environment with a credit card in about 90 seconds.

It's no secret BYOD and consumerization have changed the balance of of power in organizations. To combat that, many companies are producing their own internal apps as alternatives to consumer offerings, but research has found that a vast majority of users don't like the company offerings. That means you had better come up with better alternatives and work harder to understand your users' requirements.

It would seem that the best way to learn from your users about their needs would be to simply ask them, but experts suggest that people might have a hard time articulating what they need --or not even understand it. That's why it's better to watch them work, then build apps that improve that process.

This week Nuxeo, the open source content management system for business, announced a major release that brings together several, earlier smaller releases. The platform provides the means to build "content-centric applications to manage business information in an open source package.

This week we look at Red Hat's goal to dominate the OpenStack cloud, how close we could be to a cloud-based Windows and how to avoid screwing up your Scrum.

We've seen the CEOs of Microsoft, Blackberry, Nokia and Acer go down this year and it's not a coincidence. The industry has shifted and changing CEOs is a desperate attempt to stem the tide. What we are seeing is the scenario defined in Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma playing out for us as smartphones and tablets redefine the industry and old guard companies struggle to change.

I spent yesterday testing two-step verification with the best of intentions, but what I learned was that as currently designed it's just too hard. It worked fine on my PC, but every time I tried to use it on my mobile device, it went haywire and I shut it down. Too bad too because the password is clearly not enough.

This week, we discuss cloud migration myths, if BlackBerry and Secusmart thwarted US surveillance of Chancellor Merkel and focusing completely on UX.

Big Data has always made sense in the cloud. After all, if you need more resources, they'll give you as much as you need, but up until fairly recently, if you wanted to crunch big data using Hadoop, you were limited to your datacenter. But that's changing as cloud vendors from HP to Rackspace, to Amazon to Microsoft Azure are swarming to move your Hadoop business to the cloud.

Smartphone developers have a lot of options besides iOS and Android, and this infographic illustrates some of the latest trends in mobile development including the most popular platforms. Number 3 might just surprise you.

This week, we look at a history of computers on the Dr. Who show, how healthcare.gov is a high profile, but typical government IT project and how security budgets can't keep up with threats.

While private sector businesses have been embracing Bring Your Own Device in a big way and finding ways to deal with security concerns around protecting company data, governments are more reluctant to adopt this policy. Are they right to try and control the phones of government workers or should they join the BYOD wave too?

If you're still questioning the viability of the cloud, consider that a new study by Cisco predicts that by 2017 more than 2/3 of all data center activity will be in the cloud. That means it's time to put aside questions of the cloud and prepare your company for the future or risk being left in the dust.

Sure, the HP Chromebook 11 is attractive, especially for that $279 price tag. In many ways it resembles the old white MacBooks, but when you get beyond the good looks, this machine is slow and frustrating, and you're much better off with the dowdy $249 Samsung

This week, we look at a developer's guide to the future of the car, does the cloud exist and iOS beating Android when it comes to enterprise custom apps by a wide margin.

A Gartner survey found that while there's plenty of interest in Big Data, so far at least that hasn't translated into many deployments. That means companies across all sectors are being cautious about their approach, while still recognizing the potential.

Microsoft is an untenable position these days caught between its lucrative legacy desktop Windows and Office software business and its desire to transition to a devices and services company. When you throw in corporate politics and shareholder anxiety, it's going to be a huge challenge to find a way forward.