Michigan in the Cloud

Happy holidays from my home state, Michigan! I traded the Mediterranean climate of San Francisco for the possibility of a white Christmas here, and got it.

When I was growing up, Michigan was still near the top of its game in the automotive industry, and a manufacturing mecca for the industry and its suppliers.  It was like Silicon Valley is in the computer industry. Now, Michigan leads the nation in unemployment, largely because the state is heavily tied to the struggling automotive industry. Just as the automotive industry brought jobs, wealth, and talent to Michigan, I hope something else will replace or supplement it to help compensate for the nearly 1,000,000 jobs that Michigan will have lost between 2000 and 2011, according to this forecast by the University of Michigan.

Michigan’s present and future do indeed seem a little cloudy. Michigan CIO Ken Theis announced in September plans to build a data center up to 100,000 square feet that will provide storage and cloud-computing services to all levels of government in the state and to private industry as well. Theis positions the data center as a competitive alternative to offshore hosting for large companies; as a cost-effective hosting and cloud-computing environment for start-ups; and as a service that will standardize and streamline government computing environments, cut costs, and improve services.

As this article by Steve Towns of Government Technology indicates, Ken Theis is also working hard to bring IT jobs to the state, and he is succeeding. In September IBM opened a new software development facility in East Lansing that’s expected to generate as many as 1,500 new jobs over the next five years; in June General Electric announced it will build an advanced technology and training center in Wayne County that will employ 1,200 people.

Furthermore, in the Center for Digital Government’s biennial Digital States Survey, Michigan ranked first overall in 2004 and 2006, and second in 2008 and 2002.

Michigan provides a good example of a state that is working hard to innovate with technology and create new jobs during difficult economic times. Many businesses have similar goals and initiatives with cloud computing. Consider these innovative solutions as your company works toward improving its business performance next year:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Innovation has continually helped us through challenges in the past, and it will be key to better decision-making and a better business climate ahead.

Potluck in the Cloud

Yesterday my colleagues and I had a potluck dinner for our holiday party. It was excellent: char-grilled tri-tip and chicken, al pastor tacos, yams, potato and rice casseroles, asparagus, salad, cheesecake, cookies, cheese and crackers, chips and salsa and dip, hot dogs, cocktails, and wine.

The obvious advantages of potlucks are that they give everyone a chance to participate in meal preparation; bring what they want to contribute; try new dishes or new recipes of familiar dishes; and enjoy more dishes than would normally be the case if it were catered or if the group ordered individually at a restaurant. There’s a spirit of collaboration and satisfaction in a successful group effort resulting in the pleasure of a great meal.

There are similar advantages to cloud-based computing systems. Since they’re usually easy to prepare, scale, and serve to users, you don’t need a master chef and numerous other chefs to architect, provision, and configure them. You and your department can collaborate on ideas among the many niche cloud applications that you want to bring to the table. Cloud-based solutions are also less expensive and leaner than on-premises systems.

One issue you may have with cloud-based solutions is that they are new to you, just like dishes you never tried. If that is the case, try these delicacies; we put them through a rigorous vetting process to ensure that they have the right recipe for success:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Happy holidays! May your culinary experiences during this festive time all attain the satisfaction I had at the holiday potluck, and may your cloud-based systems bring good cheer in the coming year!

Cloud Computing and Freedom of Expression

Led Zeppelin

I just spent an hour doing what was unthinkable 10 years ago: I recorded a Led Zeppelin song, “Ten Years Gone,” on my doubleneck acoustic guitar using my pocket-size digital video camera, and uploaded it to YouTube for anyone to view (here it is). In the past, I or anyone would have needed to weave through various entertainment-industry channels to get a video recorded and distributed to a large audience. There are many contingencies, dependencies, and expenses involved in that process!

With YouTube and other video sites, the audience is now limitless and timeless for anyone who wants to create and share videos. Social media has created an unprecedented freedom of expression and ability to connect; it has also expanded our ability to learn in ways many of us couldn’t imagine 10 years ago. For example, I can watch many of the great guitar masters and learn from them anytime.

Enterprise cloud computing has an appeal similar to the freedom of expression that social media has created. Rather than having to deal with many contingencies, dependencies, and expenses, like building a data center, buying and configuring expensive hardware and software, and waiting months or years for the result, cloud computing provides nearly instant access to the applications and data that businesses and users need for success.

In the past, it was difficult to get a dashboard or a report created; it often took months and considerable expense. Now, as author and former CTO at SAP Nenshad Bardoliwalla points out in point five in this post, “basic reporting is now a commodity” because of software-as-a-service business intelligence (SaaS BI).

Cloud computing also provides freedom of expression in that more end users who could benefit from a business-intelligence application, for example, can actually access one because SaaS BI can be turned on and off instantly for end users. It also allows companies the freedom to try new applications, such as eiVia for predictive analytics; Mimiran for price optimization; BranchIt for enterprise relationship management; and mashmatrix Dashboard for enterprise mashup dashboards that can reveal new insights that were unthinkable even five years ago. In this post, “BI for the Front Lines,” Birst Founder and CEO Brad Peters illustrates how SaaS BI can be rolled out to more users for better business performance.

The Led Zeppelin song, “Ten Years Gone,” is about a decision between a girlfriend and a career in music. Fewer than 10 years ago, enterprise IT, finance, and line-of-business executives needed to decide between requests for important information services. Now, the lower cost and rapid deployment of cloud-based systems make those decisions easier or eliminate them altogether, resulting in a freedom of expression that I think will lead to a better business climate and business performance ahead.

Thousands of years have gone to get us to this point; I wonder what insights and capabilities we will have 10 years from now that are unthinkable today.

A Mashup of IT Predictions for 2010

Now that we’re really gearing up for 2010 and the dawn of a new decade, and since enterprise mashup dashboards and business intelligence are often cited as important IT initiatives for 2010, I thought it would be good to at least have a text mashup dashboard of the many IT predictions that are circulating, to enhance our own business intelligence.

Here are some IT predictions for 2010 that I’ve run across and found useful and insightful, in alphabetical order by author or organization:

• Nenshad Bardoliwanna: “The Top 10 Trends for 2010 in Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management.“ This is a great read from author and former CTO at SAP.
• Burton Group issued three news releases about 2010 IT predictions: for executive planning (externalization, consumerization, and democratization of IT); data management (database management, business intelligence, data governance, metrics); and IT(externalization, consumerization, globalization; cloud computing; data center transformation; social computing; wireless everything).
• Computerworld: “7 Smartphone predictions for 2010,” by Matt Hamblen. Among them: AT&T loses its iPhone exclusive deal.
• Dr. Dobb’s: “Other Voices: 8 IT Predictions for 2010,” by Jake Sorofman “2009 is a year we shouldn’t soon forget. In fact, it’s a year we ought to remember — as the year that changed enterprise IT.”
• eWeek: “IT security predictions for 2010.” “Researchers from IBM and Sophos shared their thoughts on what the security threat landscape will look like for enterprises and consumers alike in 2010. Their predictions run the gamut from threats to social networking sites to an increase in attackers targeting hosted services.”
• Forrester Research: “Cloud computing belongs on your three-year roadmap.” We get two bonus years with this post.
• Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010: Cloud computing and advanced analytics top the list
• IDC Top 10 Predictions: “As we have for the past three decades, IDC ends the year with our outlook for the coming year in the information technology (IT) and telecommunications market. During the next 60 days, IDC will publish literally dozens of IDC Top 10 Predictions documents for 2010.” Keep checking this site for updates.
• IDG News Service, (Computerworld, Infoworld, etc.), “10 tech predictions for 2010,” by Nancy Weil: “We see modest economic recovery, e-reader buzz, new faces in old places, lots of mobile news, and more.”
• Todd Lane: My five predictions are in this post.
• Jennifer Leggio, Social Business writer for ZDNet, includes many social media predictions from luminaries such as Charlene Li and Nenshad Bardoliwanna in this post, “2010 Predictions: Will social media reach ubiquity?”
• Social Media Today: “Five Social Media Predictions for 2010,” by Joel Postman “Enterprise Social Software Applications Will Become Commonplace.”
• Trend Micro 2010 Future Threat Report: Virtualization, Cloud-Computing and a Shifting Internet Infrastructure Will Widen the Scope of Cybercrime
• Websense Security Labs Predictions for 2010: Smartphones, Windows 7, Search Engines and Legitimate Ads are Targets of Next Year’s Attacks

Also, here are links to great surveys this year by IBM andInformationWeek about the impact of business intelligence during the economic downturn, the top priorities of CIOs, and IT innovation:

• New IBM Study Uncovers Business Strategies For Weathering Economic Storm
• New IBM Study Highlights Analytics As Top Priority For Today’s CIO
• InformationWeek 500: A Year Of Relentless Innovation

I hope that this will provide plenty of reading about what may happen in IT in 2010. While you’re at it, here are some great cloud-computing companies that will continue to shine in the year ahead:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Good luck in 2010, and may all the good predictions come true!

What are your IT predictions for 2010?  Are there any sources you would add to the above lists?

2010: The Year of Business Intelligence

Now that 2009 and the first decade of the 21^st Century are drawing to a close, I was thinking that I may not have an opportunity to write another 2010 prediction piece; but today this came in: “The Top 10 Trends for 2010 in Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management,” by Nenshad Bardoliwalla, an author, recently CTO for enterprise performance management (EPM) and governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) at SAP.

The title struck me because business intelligence is high on the priority list of organizations today, so a piece that provides 10 trend predictions within one of the hottest areas of business and IT strategy is interesting.

The post is brilliantly written and thought out. I summarized the supporting text of each trend for brevity below. Here are Nenshad Bardoliwalla’s top 10 trends for 2010 in analytics, business intelligence, and performance management:

1.  We will witness the emergence of packaged strategy-driven execution applications. Strategy-driven execution, as Bardoliwalla defined in his book, is “the complete fusion of goals, initiatives, plans, forecasts, risks, controls, performance monitoring, and optimization with transactional processes.” He cites applications provided by Workday and SalesForce.com as examples that include embedded real-time contextual reporting for the fusion of analytic and transactional capability in the context of business processes.

2. The holy grail of the predictive, real-time enterprise will start to deliver on its promises. The holy grail of analytic technologies has always been the promise of being able to predict future outcomes by sensing and responding, with minimal latency between event and decision point. Combining predictive analytics and real-time complex event processing capabilities will lead to new classes of applications for business management that were unimaginable a decade ago.

3. The industry will put reporting and slice-and-dice capabilities in their appropriate places and return to its decision-centric roots with a healthy dose of Web 2.0 style collaboration. SaaS BI will reduce report-production cost to nearly free. Mashups will allow users to assemble all of the relevant data for making a decision; social capabilities will allow users to discuss this relevant data to generate “crowdsourced” wisdom; and explicit decisions, along with automated inferences, will be captured and correlated against outcomes.

4. Performance, risk, and compliance management will continue to become unified in a process-based framework and make the leap out of the CFO’s office. The disciplines of performance, risk, and compliance management have been considered separate for a long time, but the walls are breaking down for effective organizational governance. While financial performance, risk, and compliance management are clearly the areas of most significant investment for most companies, these concerns are now finally becoming enterprise-level plays that are escaping the confines of the CFO.  We will continue to witness significant investment in sales and marketing performance management.

5. SaaS / Cloud BI Tools will steal significant revenue from on-premises vendors but also fight for limited oxygen amongst themselves. From many accounts, this was the year that SaaS-based offerings hit the mainstream due to their numerous advantages over on-premises offerings, and this certainly was in evidence with the significant uptick in investment and market visibility of SaaS BI vendors. Vendors like Birst continue to announce wins at a fair clip along with innovations at a fraction of the cost of their on-premises brethren. There is little reason for any customer to invest in on-premises capabilities at the price/performance ratio that the SaaS vendors are offering.

6. The undeniable arrival of the era of big data will lead to further proliferation in data management alternatives.  We have witnessed an explosion of exciting data management offerings in the last few years that have reinvigorated the information management sector of the industry.  The largest web players such as Google (BigTable), Yahoo (Hadoop), Amazon (Dynamo), and Facebook (Cassandra) have built their own solutions to handle their own incredible data volumes, with the open source Hadoop ecosystem and commercial offerings like CloudEra leading the charge in broad awareness.  Additionally, a whole new industry of DBMSs dedicated to analytic workloads have sprung up, with flagship vendors like Netezza, Greenplum, Vertica, Aster Data, and the like with significant innovations in in-memory processing, exploiting parallelism, columnar storage options, and more. Additionally, significant opportunities to push application processing into the databases themselves are manifesting themselves.  Visionary applications of this technology in areas like metereological forecasting and genomic sequencing with massive data volumes will become possible at hitherto unimaginable price points.

7. Advanced visualization will continue to increase in depth and relevance to broader audiences.  With consumers broadly aware of the features of Google Maps or the tactile manipulations possible on the iPhone, these capabilities will find their way into enterprise offerings at a rapid speed lest the gap between the consumer and enterprise realms become too large and lead to large-scale adoption revolts as a younger generation begins to enter the workforce having never known the green screens of yore.

8. Open source offerings will continue to make in-roads against on-premises offerings. Much as SaaS BI offerings are doing, open source offerings in the larger BI market are disrupting the incumbent, closed-source, on-premises vendors.

9. Data quality, data integration, and data virtualization will merge with master data management to form a unified information management platform for structured and unstructured data. Increasingly, data quality and data integration will be interlocked to ensure the right, cleansed data is moved to downstream sources by attacking the problem at its root.  With the amount of relevant data sources exploding in the enterprise and no way to integrate all the data sources into a single physical location while maintaining agility, vendors like Composite Software are providing data virtualization capabilities, whereby canonical information models can be overlaid on top of information assets regardless of where they are located, capable of addressing the federation of batch, real-time and event data sources.  These disparate data soures will need to be harmonized by strong master data management capabilities, whereby the definitions of key entities in the enterprise like customers, suppliers, products, etc. can be used to provide semantic unification over these distributed data sources.  Finally, structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information will all be able to be extracted, transformed, loaded, and queried from this ubiquitious information management platform by leveraging text analytics that continue to grow in importance and combining them with data virtualization capabilities.

10. Excel will continue to provide the dominant paradigm for end-user BI consumption.  For Excel specifically, the number one analytic tool by far with a home on hundreds of millions of personal desktops, Microsoft has invested significantly in ensuring its continued viability as we move past its second decade of existence, and its adoption shows absolutely no sign of abating any time soon.

It will be interesting to see how Nenshad’s predictions play out during 2010. I think that online spreadsheet eiVia will make inroads to Excel for predictive analytics in 2010.

For a great overview of SaaS BI, read “What’s Up with Cloud Analytics,” by Dave Wells.

If you want to derive quick, cost-effective, flexible, and scalable benefits from business intelligence during 2010, here are some excellent SaaS solutions to consider:

Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.

SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.

Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.

Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.

Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.

Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.

Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

I am excited that BI is such a high priority for 2010 and the beginning of a new decade. I know it will help optimize business performance and decisions, and possibly also help provide a more stable economy and business climate ahead. An excellent new study by IBM clearly indicates that businesses that applied analytics-derived insights outperformed their peers in the economic downturn, and are poised to break away during economic recovery.

What do you think of Nenshad Bardoliwalla’s top 10 trends for 2010 in analytics, business intelligence, and performance management, and how do you plan to improve business intelligence in 2010?

Music of the Clouds

Video of J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, from St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach composed and conducted

I recently attended a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Christmas Oratorio at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco. It was an excellent performance of a piece that is in six parts, each part originally intended for performance on one of the six feast days of the Christmas period. The Christmas Oratorio includes an orchestra, a chorus, and soloists who sing the character roles.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the greatest composers of classical and religious music. He wrote for all instruments and ensembles of his time, including choir, orchestra, voice, harpsichord, lute, violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, and organ. The melodic and harmonic language that we hear in most music today developed during Bach’s time, the Baroque period. Bach was a prolific composer, whose catalog currently includes 1,128 pieces.

Bach was also a prolific procreator. The stories of today’s large families that we occasionally hear about pale somewhat in comparison to Bach, who fathered 20 children, although only 10 survived to adulthood in a time when medical expertise was primitive and life expectancy short compared to today. Four of his children became composers whose music is still played today.

An important feature of hearing a performance at Davies Symphony Hall is the acoustic properties of the hall, which was acoustically renovated in 1992. Here is San Francisco Chronicle Music Critic Robert Commanday’s reaction to the new sound of the hall. I think the most interesting acoustic features of the hall are the moveable plexiglas“clouds” above the stage. As this San Francisco Chronicle article by Jesse Hamlin explains in more detail, the 59 clouds can be raised, lowered, and angled to best project and blend the music being played. For example, the clouds could be positioned higher to resonate, blend, and project a gigantic Mahler symphony, and lower to capture and project the relatively quiet sound of a string quartet. The clouds can be sculpted in a wave shape or aligned, like a ceiling, in a single plane.

Video of the San Francisco Symphony recording Maher’s Symphony No. 8, “Symphony of a Thousand,” in Davies Symphony Hall, with good video of the plexiglas clouds above the stage

Cloud computing has similar properties to the acoustic clouds in Davies Symphony Hall, providing the flexibility that companies need to adjust to changing business conditions. Whether rolling out productivity applications for all users on a grand scale, like Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand,” or scaling business intelligence from a successful team project, like a string quartet, to a mid-size department, like a Mozart symphony, cloud-based solutions move with your needs. Furthermore, cloud-based solutions can integrate with each other and with legacy systems, just like new and ancient instruments may play together in a modern composition.

Consider this integrated orchestra of instrumental cloud-based solutions under the direction of your line-of-business virtuosi and Maestro Kenneth Marshall:

• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services. 
• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of a customer or patient on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

Recording of “Nuages” (Clouds) by jazz guitar great Django Reinhardt and his orchestra

Clouds can transform your business just as they transformed the sound of Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall. With the flexibility to instantly scale by adding and removing users; low infrastructure costs, configuration, and up-front investments; and the ability to compose and orchestrate new solutions almost as fast as Bach could compose a cantata or a fugue; your management, peers, and users will sing your praise all the way to the clouds.

As composer-in-residence at your organization, what cloud-based instruments do you plan to include in your next masterpiece?

Alcatraz Island and Maximum Security

Last weekend I visited Alcatraz Island for the first time. Having lived in San Francisco since 1991, I always felt somewhat guilty that I hadn’t visited this major landmark and national park for so long. So, for the crime of Alcatraz evasion, I did my time, I paid the price, and I’m glad I did.

                         

From the Wikipedia, here’s the story of its name: The first Spaniard to discover the island was Juan Manuel de Ayala in 1775, who charted San Francisco Bay and named the island “La Isla de los Alcatraces,” which translates as “The Island of the Pelicans,” from the archaic Spanish alcatraz, “pelican,” a word which was borrowed originally from Arabic: القطرس al-qaṭrās, meaning sea eagle.

This document from the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy provides a good, quick history of Alcatraz Island.

                                     

I highly recommend visiting Alcatraz. Included in the ticket price is an excellent audio tour, hosted by former prison guards and inmates. There is also an excellent guided walking tour available just after you exit the boat. The ferry ride on San Francisco Bay provides spectacular views.

I bought a facsimile edition of the “Institution Rules & Regulations” by Warden Paul J. Madigan, revised in 1956, to learn more about prison life following the excellent tour. It was interesting to read an exact copy of the 1956 manual that all inmates received and were required to know, obey, and keep in their cells at all times.

The manual includes 53 rules and regulations on 19 pages. The rule that struck me the most is number 46, “MUSIC RULES,” which is among the longest in the book. Here are a few excerpts:

• Musical instruments may be purchased if approved by the Associate Warden.
• Guitars and other stringed instruments may be played in the cellhouse in a QUIET manner only between the hours of 5:30 P.M. and 7:00 P.M.. No singing or whistling accompaniments will be tolerated. Any instrument which is played in an unauthorized place, manner, or time will be confiscated and the inmate placed on a disciplinary report.
• Wind instruments, drums and pianos will be played in the band or Orchestra Rooms on Saturdays, Sundays and Holidays. At no time will you play any wind instrument in the cellhouse.
• Permission to play instruments in the Band, Orchestra or bathrooms may be granted by the Associate Warden to inmates in good standing.
• A limited number of inmates may be allowed to take musical instruments to and from the recreation yard.
• No inmate is allowed to give, sell, trade, exchange, gamble, loan or otherwise dispose of his personal or institutional instrument or to receive such from another inmate.
• Institutional instruments may be loaned to inmates in good standing upon the approval of the Associate Warden.
• Guitar strings shall be purchased in the regular manner and stored in “A” Block until needed. An old set of strings must be turned in to the cellhouse Officer to draw a new set.

There were many rules and regulations at Alcatraz, just like there are in IT security and governance. As your company moves to enterprise cloud computing, where your data may be stored and applications may be hosted off-premises with other companies’ data, your company needs to ensure data security and privacy.

In this three-part article series, “How to justify information security spending on cloud computing,” cloud-security expert Dan Sullivan provides an excellent overview and assessment of security and compliance concerns. You may need to register for free to view it, but it’s well worth it. In parts one and two, Dan covers topics such as:

• Desktop software replacement
• Back-office infrastructure
• General security considerations
• Encryption measures
• Availability and SLAs
• Compliance
• Infrastructure security
• Protecting data in transit and the demise of network boundaries
• Sharing data with trusted business partners
• Employees and personal information devices

The third part is a 27-page pdf about many aspects of compliance in considerable detail, with many references to specific laws, their compliance requirements, and how to fulfill them.

For further reading, you can download the complete eBook here. Again, you may need to register for free.

Dan’s excellent work explaining cloud-security concepts reminds me of the excellent tour and the thorough rules and regulations manual at Alcatraz, where it was all about maximum security. Dan shows that cloud computing security and compliance policies can be implemented with equal or better rigor and uniformity than on-premises systems.

Leading solutions that help solve your concerns for compliance and security in the cloud include:

• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Softwarethat provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from TriCipher that provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications

How do you plan to secure your data for compliance and security in the cloud even better than the penitentiary secured its premises on Alcatraz Island?