Features

• H-1B demand this year will be fast, furious

  The U.S. begins accepting new H-1B visa petitions on Monday, April 1, and fast demand is expected. This is going to be followed by much fury.

• It's twilight for small in-house data centers

  Virtualization, cloud services and SaaS is making it much easier to shift IT infrastructure operations to service providers, and that is exactly what many users are doing.

• Security concerns bedevil Chinese outsourcing

  China's plan to create a competitive outsourcing industry was hit with another blow last month with the release of a report that lay bare, in ways never seen before, the extent of the security risks of working in the country.

• SOPA blowback, and other tech predictions for 2013

  The most controversial tech issue taken up by the outgoing Congress was, by far, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Here's the outlook for legislation for the next Congress.

• The Grill: Energy Plus CIO Hugh Scott

  CIO Hugh Scott decided to move to the cloud within months of joining Energy Plus Holdings. Here, he discusses the challenges of moving into a leadership position at a new company, the importance of forging relationships with vendor partners and his approach to building a motivated IT team.