Things would be so simple if companies could just sit down and agree for everyone to use the same computers, or at least the same operating system. In a perfect world, everyone would use Windows or UNIX or Apple or Linux and IT admins might actually find time to lean back and rest their weary bones.

But since we don’t live in a perfect world, admins live in a nightmare of mixed platforms and systems where juggling sensitive data around is something Dante would have described in grueling detail if computers had been around when he wrote the “Inferno”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Without getting into the umpteenth discussion about what, who and where is the Cloud, I think we can safely assume that for average people, and especially for businesspeople, Cloud Computing is when you run an application or store some data on someone else’s server somewhere out there “in the Cloud”. By this definition, Salesforce.com, just to name an instance, fits just about everybody’s idea of Cloud Computing .

Oracle’s Larry Ellison would beg to differ, and he actually traded insults onstage at Open World 2010 with Salesforce’s boss Marc Benioff, whom he accused of “just running a few applications on some servers.” To which Benioff memorably replied: “You can’t run a cloud in a box, Larry” – referring to Oracle’s jumbo-sized „Exalogic Elastic Cloud“ which Ellison had just introduced.

Which is funny, because according to Chandar Pattabhiram, VP Product Marketing at Cast Iron Systems, a small Silicon valley startup recently acquired by IBM, the box metaphore is actually a pretty good description of Salesforce itself.

The problem with most SaaS applications (and Salesforce is regularly cited as the best-known example of SaaS at work) is that they are completely self-contained, meaning that they have no connection to the other systems a company may be running. In fact, many CIOs will tell you if they’re honest that they don’t know if anyone is running Salesforce in their company, since they probably didn’t ask IT’s permission in the first place. This, by the way, is a prime reason for the paranoia many CIOs feel towards Cloud Computing in general, since it implies a loss of control over what is going on in the company, IT-wise.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me, right? But I guess that’s what comes from dealing to long with IT security people whose chosen profession involves trying to outsmart some very smart people on the dark side of computing.

I love listening to my friend Andy Müller-Maguhn, for instance. He’s one of the founders of the Chaos Computer Club in Hamburg, who likes to scare the heck out of managers in the audience by describing the ingenious ways hackers have for breaking into other people’s systems and what all the horrible damage they can do there.

Andy is one of the good guys, of course, or so he says. And yeah, you can hire him as a security consultant, just in case. Which sort of reminds me of the young men in Naples who wash your windshield while you wait at a stoplight and rip your wiper blades off if you don’t tip them.

Which brings us in a very roundabout way to a security risk I somehow never thought of before, but now it worries me no end. The guy who stirred me up is David Ting, a charming IT professional who founded a small company a few years back called Imprivata that has been generating a lot of publicity recently for a product called “OneSIgn Secure Walk-Away”.  In fact, just last week they won the UK IT Industry’s prestigious “Security Innovation of the Year” award for it. Seems like folks in Britain were as disturbed as I was to find that there had been a serious security risk lurking under their very noses they had somehow overlooked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Adobe is a company everybody likes. Okay, with the possible exception of Steve Jobs, that is. But really: Adobe is probably the largest vendor in the IT industry that doesn’t compete head-on with any of the other giants. In fact, cooperation seems to be somehow bred into their genes, which is why the Adobe managers I met with recently in Paris seemed to be exceptionally nice.

But that may change.

Read the rest of this entry »