Decoding the new economy

Security and cloud computing

Understanding risks with online computing is the best way to manage it.

Last Friday cloud accounting service Saasu ran their Cloud Conference looking at the business benefits of online computing and business automation.

Among the topics discussed was the security of cloud computing with Stilgherrian giving an excellent overview of the state of information security.

Stil’s message is clear; online security is everyone’s problem – if the bad guys want to target you for whatever reason they will.

As a business owner, it’s essential to take basic precautions. This is something I’ve covered before and something Stil raises in his presentation by pointing out that Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate lists 35 mitigation strategies based on the security breaches they examined in 2010.

Of those thirty-five, the top five would prevent 85% of security breaches. The top one – keeping your applications up to date – would avoid almost every PC malware attack along with Apple Mac’s Flashback worm.

In answering my question about how Saasu and other cloud computing users can protect their system, Stil also raised a good point about using virtual machines for web browsing and even purchasing a computer just for business accounting and banking use so the services can’t be compromised.

Related to this topic is an ongoing discussion on the Reddit forums between posters claiming to be malware writers and botnet operators.

While it’s risky to trust everything you read on Reddit, the tips are worthwhile, particularly the advice to “disable addons in your browser and only activate the ones you need.”

By reducing the number of programs running on your computer or the add ons in your web browser, you lessen the risk of being infected. Again this would have protected the victims of the Flashback worm.

The security of our systems is our own responsibility, just like our home and office security.

Cloud computing is no different to other computing – the basics of information security, or #infosec, are the same regardless of whether you’re using software on your computer or the cloud.

Used responsibly, cloud computing is no less or more secure than any other computer or smartphone use. We shouldn’t underestimate the risks, or get hysterical about the threats.

Is the Paperless Office promise about to come true?

For twenty years abolishing paper has been promised. Is the promise about to be delivered?

For as long as personal computers have been around the paperless office one of the holy grails of the IT industry.

Paper is messy, difficult to file or store and cruel to the environment. So being able to move and save information electronically made sense.

Despite the promises of the last twenty years, the quest for the paperless office seemed lost.

While the networked PC gave us the ability to get rid of paper, its advanced word processing functions and graphic capabilities along with the data explosion of email tempted us into generating more paper.

To compound the problem, over the last thirty years paper manufacturers found cheaper ways to make their product which meant the price of paper dropped dramatically just as we found more ways to use it.

So rather than delivering on the promise of eliminating paper, computers generated more than ever before.

Just as it seemed all was lost in IT’s War On Paper, the tablet computer came along. Coupled with cloud computing services and accessible fast wireless Internet, suddenly it appears we might just be on the verge on delivering on those promises of the last twenty years.

At a suburban football game I saw this first hand as I watched the ground officials electronically filing match information with their league.

“This used to be a pile of paperwork that used to take until Tuesday to be filed and collated” the ground manager told me, “today it’s done within half an hour of the game ending with almost no paper involved.”

For amateur sports clubs, money isn’t so much the problem as time. There simply are never enough volunteers to meet the workload of getting a team on field.

This is true with almost any community based organisation – from volunteer firefighters to community kindergartens organisers struggle with rosters and finding helpers.

In business the same resource constraints exist except we know we can fix these problems by paying a worker to do it. The problem there is few businesses have unlimited funds to employ filing clerks and form fillers to handle the paperwork.

By killing paper in the office, we’re making business and the economy more efficient. We’re about to deliver on that promise.

Bill Gates once wrote that in the short term we overpromise what technology can deliver while in the long term we underestimate its effects.

This is true of the paperless office – now that promise is being delivered the effects on business and government will be profound.

Is your business prepared for these changes?

Undermining the cloud

Google’s broad claim on users’ data risks the viability of their services

Whenever I do a presentation on cloud computing and social media for business, I focus on one important area – The Terms Of Service.

Google’s relaunch of their Cloud Drive product has reminded us of the risks that hide in these terms, particularly with the one clause;

When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. This license continues even if you stop using our Services (for example, for a business listing you have added to Google Maps). Some Services may offer you ways to access and remove content that has been provided to that Service. Also, in some of our Services, there are terms or settings that narrow the scope of our use of the content submitted in those Services. Make sure you have the necessary rights to grant us this license for any content that you submit to our Services.

This is an almost identical clause to that introduced – and quickly dropped by file sharing Dropbox – last year. It’s also pretty well standard in the social media services including Facebook.

Basically it means that while you retain ownership of anything you post to Google Drive, or most of other Google’s services including Google Docs you’re giving the corporation the rights to use the data in any way they choose.

While the offending clause does go onto say this term is “for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones” there is no definition of what operating, promoting or improving their services actually means.

Not that it matters anyway, as one of the later terms says they reserve the right to change any clause at any time they choose. So if Google decided that selling your client spreadsheets to the highest bidder will improve the service for their shareholders, then so be it.

If you’re a photographer then the pictures you upload to Facebook or Google+ now are licensed to these organisations as are all the documents stored on Cloud Drive.

To be fair this is not just a Google issue, Facebook has similar terms as do many others. Surprisingly just as many premium, paid for services have these conditions as free ones.

Because these Terms Of Service are about establishing a power relationship, there’s usually an over-reach by large companies with these terms.

While an over-reach is understandable, its not healthy where the customer has to trust that the big corporation will do the right thing.

Right now, if you’re using a cloud or social media service for important business information you may want to check that service doesn’t have terms that grant them a license to your intellectual property.

Why VCs hate Amazon

How cloud computing is changing investment and entire industries

“Venture capital investors hate us” said Dr Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com at the April Sydney FED, “once you needed five million dollars to launch a new technology business, today you need $50,000 and a big box of ramen.”

Dr Vogels was talking about the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform that underpins many of the cloud computing and social media sites which are redefining how we use computers and the web.

What’s really interesting with the doctor’s comment is it’s only part of the story; for businesses outside the tech sectors –say retailers or service companies – they get cheap or even free access to the cloud computing services running on AWS or its cloud competitors like Windows Azure.

For those businesses, it’s possible to start an idea for nothing but the founder’s time; rather than putting fliers up at the local bus stop or shopping mall an entrepreneur starting an online store or neighbourhood computer repair business now can create a website and all the local search profiles without spending a cent.

Being able to start up a business with little, if any, capital means we’re seeing a new breed of innovators and entrepreneurs entering markets.

At the corporate level, or in the $50 million dollar VC investment field, the opportunities for exploring Big Data without buying big supercomputers is another benefit of the cloud computing services.

Services like ClimateCorp which insures farmers against extreme weather couldn’t have existed a few years ago as the processing power to analyse historical rain and drought data was only available to those with insanely expensive super computers.

Today, the combined power of millions of low powered cheap computers – the definition of cloud computing – delivers the processing grunt of a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost.

Access to cheap computing power means innovations can be bought to market quickly and at a fraction of the cost that was normal a decade ago.

We’re in early days with what the effects of super cheap computing means to most industries, but it is changing industries as diverse as agriculture, banking, logistics and retail quickly.

Cloud computing is giving big business the tools to understand their markets better and small business the ability to grab customers from bigger competitors who are too slow or don’t want to face what their clients really think.

These are the forces that are changing the way business is being done; if you’re in business it’s time to start paying attention.

In reality, Dr Vogels is pulling our legs – the smart VCs aren’t hating Amazon, they are rubbing their hands at the profits that are going to be made in disrupting cosy industries.

Overselling technology

Do technologists promise too much?

“We’d like to allow remote band members – say a violinist in the Australian outback – be able to participate in an orchestra as if they were there. We hope the NBN will be able to do this.”

When the band organiser said this at a business roundtable all the technologists, myself included, choked.

There are many things the Australian National Broadband Network will deliver but the ability to teleport a violinist from the outback to downtown Sydney or Melbourne isn’t one of them.

One of the problems with technology is we tend to oversell the immediate effects; as Bill Gates famously said “The impact of all new technologies is overestimated in the short term but under estimated in the long term.”

Because we tend to sell the immediate sizzle, customers are disappointed when our promises don’t eventuate. In the decade it takes to win them back, those initial benefits we didn’t deliver in six months have become commonplace.

This is probably one of the reasons why businesses are reluctant to invest in new technology or online services; they’ve heard the promises before and they don’t trust what they can hear.

In the late 1990s businesses spent tens of thousands – sometimes millions – establishing websites that didn’t work. Those financial scars still hurt when they hear talk, some of them are still paying off those sites. So it’s barely surprising they are reluctant to return to a sector that has now matured.

Perhaps it’s best to underpromise; instead of cloud computer vendors committing themselves to 80% savings and social media experts promising millions of customers from their new viral video, it may be better to be more realistic with the expectations.

Customers have become deaf to wonderful promises, they are expecting us to deliver. Promising the world is no longer a business strategy.

Channel blues

Cloud computing is changing the IT industry

“We do the pre-sales work then they come along and steal the customers. It’s wrong, just wrong” growled the sales manager of an IT integrator while talking about one of the leading cloud computing services.

The business model of systems integrators is to be a company’s, or home’s, trusted advisor on IT and make money from charging for their services and the profit in selling software and equipment.

In the last few years that model has become tough – the collapsing price of hardware has made the profits on selling systems leaner while the increased life of systems has meant the big lucrative upgrades have become scarcer.

At the same time services have become less lucrative as more participants have entered the market, many using offshored cheap labour to provide remote support. It hasn’t helped that computers have become vastly more reliable, particularly since Microsoft have largely solved Windows’ gaping security holes.

The icing on the cake has been the end of boxed software and corporate licenses. These were extremely profitable for the systems integrator – a big sale of Microsoft Office or Oracle licenses to a government department could see an IT salesperson pay for a holiday home or cover the kids’ school and college fees.

Cloud computing has largely been the driver of all of these factors’ decline and now it is really hurting those integrators and their salesfolk who were used to a very profitable existence.

While that’s good news for computer consumers – and even better news for hapless shareholder and taxpayers who’ve been largely dudded by big IT sales pitches to gullible directors and ministers – it does beg the question of how customers now get advice and support.

Largely cloud based services rely upon customer self service and many of the providers would struggle to include user support in their list of core competencies.

There’s a business model there for systems integrators, but it’s difficult to see how many those used to fat profits in the past can, or will, adapt to the new environment.

An interesting side effect of this change is how it affects companies like Microsoft where their channel partners – largely those big and small systems integrators – are one of the most important distribution networks for their products and probably their best defense against competitors like Google and Apple. That strength is being steadily eroded.

It’s tempting to think that change affects just “old” industries like retail, publishing or car manufacturing; in reality it affects all sectors and sometimes the most modern might be hurt more than the established players.

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