As more and more businesses take a hard look at SaaS and cloud computing in general, they are moving more and more functions outside of  their datacenters.  Recently Toyota Australia said it is moving its IT infrastructure to the cloud over the next 5 years.  Like many other organizations, Toyota is not in the business of IT or delivering applications.  They are in the business of building cars and trucks.  They want to purchase business applications the same way they purchase electricity and phone service.  They want it metered and priced based on their utilization. Read the rest of this entry »

“That is the question.  ‘Tis nobler …”  I don’t want to butcher Shakespeare anymore than I have to, but a lot of people are asking this question today.  

To some it’s a fad, like the Internet and talking movies.  To others it’s the holy grail.  They see it as the salvation to their business.  Just mention cloud computing and a few other buzz words to customers and they will come running to your door.

To me, it’s a new way of looking at computing that I do believe will change things dramatically.  As the world becomes more connected and mobile, the thought of building my own infrastructure to run business applications seems a bit outdated.  My own business runs entirely in the cloud.  I still use some local applications, like Microsoft Office, but all my line of business applications are in the cloud. Read the rest of this entry »

A few interesting news items made me think about security and cloud computing.  There are many naysayers who state “I would never put anything important in the cloud.  It’s not secure.”  Yet they have no problem putting important, mission critical data in on-premise systems, which as we see from the constant data breach headlines are not very secure.  There are a number of governments who have major cloud initiatives and somehow think it’s secure enough for them.
 
In his presentation this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco Amazon Web Services (AWS) evangelist Steve Riley asked what people would think of an encryption service in the cloud.  This managed encryption service, he called it Simple Encryption Service, would encrypt all data going into or out of Amazon’s cloud.  Riley was proposing a standard of encryption that would make it easier to securely move data around the Internet and between clouds.

Read the rest of this entry »

eDocument Sciences joined Fasoo.com in a booth at the RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco from March 1 to 5 talking to customers about Enterprise Digital Rights Management and security in general.  Bill Blake, President and COO, commented that “Everyday you hear about another company getting hacked or someone stealing important documents.  The cost to a company is enormous, especially with all the new laws on the books that could fine you starting at $1000 per record stolen.” 

Fasoo.com launched and showcased ‘Fasoo Context-Sensitive DRM’ at this conference.  It scans a document for sensitive information, such as PII (Personally Identifiable Information), trade secrets or financial data, and automatically encrypts it with predefined security policies.  The nice part about that is it takes the burden off the document user to remember to do anything.  If I only need to save the document and the system takes care of the rest, I am more apt to use it.

The turnout at the event was huge with major keynote speakers, like US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano, challenging the private sector to submit ideas to raise public awareness on cybersecurity.  The US government and others are taking this very seriously and it was great to see the interest and enthusiasm on the floor and in the sessions.

I’ve been at the RSA Conference 2010 in San Francisco learning a lot of interesting things and meeting a lot of great people.  Today US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano in a keynote speech challenged the private sector to submit ideas to raise public awareness on cybersecurity.  The National Cybersecurity Awareness Campaign Challenge is designed to solicit ideas from industry and individuals on how best to clearly and comprehensively discuss cybersecurity with the American public.
  
This goes along with yesterday’s release by US Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt of a summary of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative.  This is a major undertaking by the US government to overhaul cybersecurity efforts and make them as transparent as possible to US and world citizenry. Read the rest of this entry »