SaaS Security – Tell Me More
By now, it is a well known fact that security and privacy are two of the biggest concerns for SaaS users. Off late, I have been doing some research on the security practices by various SaaS vendors and I am somewhat troubled by what I see on the websites of many of the SaaS vendors. [...]
Plain English, Transparent TOS, Please
Image via Wikipedia I started this as a comment to Krish’s post on the mental shift SaaS brings about, then realized I should make it a post on it’s own right: short, but important. Krish reflects on the recent Wall Street Journal: Do You Know Where Your Data Are?, and in his response mostly deals [...]
SaaS Users Need A Mental Shift
Two days back, Bruce Schneier wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal highlighting the risks in the SaaS based world. He argues that users lose full control of their data in SaaS and the companies are using certain deceptive tactics to lure users into their services. Cloud computing is another technology where users entrust their data [...]
Google Health Gets A Boost With The Addition Of CVS Pharmacy
Image via CrunchBase Google Health, the SaaS approach to Health Care records by Google Inc., received a boost today with the addition of CVS pharmacy to the list of pharmacies they support. I am a great sucker of online health records and, even though I was not greatly impressed, I had a neutral opinion about [...]
The Borg’s Cookies Are Delicious, Indeed
First of all, the basics: the absolutely best cookies on the face of Earth are Coach’s Oats Oatmeal Cranberry Cookies. Shame on you, Costco, for not carrying it anymore… now that you got me hooked, I have to mail order it at double cost. But today we’re talking about different kind of cookies – those [...]
Google’s New Behavioral Ad Targeting Should be Excellent for All
The discussion over Google’s latest move into behavioral ad targeting is all over TechMeme. Basically what this means is that Google will start selling users (or more specifically, clusters of users, like football fans for example) in addition to words: Today we are launching “interest-based” advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and [...]
The Sorry State of Health 2.0 – Google Health & Microsoft HealthVault
Ever since I started actively managing my parents’ health care I’ve been a heavy user of electronic health records and communication systems, and I am immensely frustrated. Frustrated at the paper-based world we’re facing in the 21st century, but also at my peers, reviewers in the media, blogs, when they discuss new developments in the [...]
One Bad Experience Doesn't Tarnish the Entire Industry
I hate it when people use a discrete example to cast doubt over an entire industry.We see it every time Gmail has an outage. We see it every time there’s a Salesforce outage. It’s unhelpful and it’s just plain wrong. The latest example came this morning – commenting on the SageLive issues, Kevin White from [...]
Cloud Computing and Multinationals
There are many posts in the blogosphere and media about the security and privacy issues associated with Cloud Computing. A big chunk of them are plain fear mongering by companies whose business interests are threatened by the proliferation of cloud based computing or by those people who are in love with such companies. I have [...]
Cloud Vendors Should Act Now
The Star Tribune from Minneapolis-St. Paul carried an article, few days back, on the issues related to keeping the data on the clouds. The author clearly identifies the issues we face in the society as we move further into the adoption of cloud computing technologies The danger is less that the cloud will be a Wild West than that [...]
Questions To Ask Before Trusting a Cloud Vendor
Many consumers and businesses are flocking to cloud computing as they see an opportunity to compete on equal footing with well established firms with big IT infrastructure. Even though there are apprehensions in the minds of clould computing customers, partly due to the myths promoted by some pundits and vendors whose core business is threatened [...]
Of Google, the Clouds and Privacy
There has been huge discussion of late around Google's plans to anonymize user data after a period of time. It seems people have concerns around vendors in general (and Google as the uber vendor in particular) knowing too much about us. Sometimes it seems that people can't see the wood for the trees. Google's success [...]
