Business

Is user data safe in the cloud?

Thousands of websites and millions of pieces of private data are increasingly in one big cloud, where some of the old rules of data security are out the window.

With the rise of cloud computing companies, and the ferocity with which tech's biggest companies are snatching those firms up, it's no secret that a good chunk of our user data is already stored in the cloud. Our emails, our documents, our MORE

The right way to lay people off

By Ben Horowitz, contributor

Cloud computing company Opsware was nobody's darling. Then founders Andreessen and Horowitz put the company through three rounds of layoffs. The unlikely result was a big buyout -- here's how it happened.

"I'm tryin' to right my wrongs / But it's funny them same wrongs helped me write this song" -Kanye West

Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), I had a conversation with the legendary venture MORE

What IBM sees in Netezza

Earlier today, IBM (IBM) announced it would purchase Netezza (NZ), a publicly-held Massachusetts-based data analytics company, for $1.7 billion.

For IBM, Netezza is the most recent of 23 acquisitions by the company over the last four years, amounting to $12 billion. (Last week, the company bought OpenPages, another company in Massachusetts that creates risk and compliance software for businesses.) Analytics technology enables companies to observe and analyze past business performance so they MORE