Enterprise class auto-classification and taxonomy management market leading solutions | Category Archive

Archive | Cloud RSS feed for this section

Yammer – Putting the Cart before the Horse?

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 14, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

Is Microsoft’s Yammer a push for social or a hammer over the heads of customers stating we will indeed use Yammer? According to Jared Spataro, who heads the Office Division at Microsoft called it Microsoft’s ‘big bet’ for social. That may very well be. Only time will tell. The newest change – at least that I know of – is the ability to replace the SharePoint News Feed with the Yammer News Feed. Pretty innocuous. Over time the plan is to combine social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, video, and line of business applications. That is assuming customers are willing to participate in a multi-tenant cloud service.

So what’s my point? Right now, social is not a high priority with customers, nor is it necessarily embraced by typical upper management. At the other end of the spectrum user adoption is a huge problem. I believe that you cannot compare a ‘consumers’ use of social to a ‘business’ use of social. In a previous blog I received a lot of great comments on LinkedIn commenting on within the walls of a company, end users do not behave the same as they do outside of those four walls. That change will take time. I participated in an independent Yammer group of topic experts just to get the feel of it – and one day a participant asked if they could start a different group as there was too much noise going on. The same can actually more easily happen within the organization. For this person, over time it was losing value.

Being from the ‘old school’ I still don’t see the ROI. Maybe there isn’t meant to be one. It is just a transition step to get us from where we are today to where the Microsoft’s of the world want us to be in the future. Although I still say show me the ROI, increase my rate of adoption, and prove the value. Let’s put the horse in front of the cart and not behind it.

Thoughts?

Comments { 0 }

Office 365 – How To Achieve Non-Intrusive Information Governance

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 12, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

The automatic generation of semantic metadata removes the end user from the tagging process as well as the subjective ambiguity. It also enables content to be related in a meaningful way without end user involvement. This enhances the value of knowledge far beyond the original intent, and expands the value of content to be accessed and used by multiple stakeholders who may or may not have known the content existed. This transforms the content into a knowledge asset as the data can be trusted, is reliable, and is correct.

The ability to generate conceptual metadata enables the sharing of information, but the lack of metadata guarantees that the data will be difficult to share, if at all. Comprehensive metadata that can capture the meaning of content improves decision making across the global organization.

Ok, sounds great but how does that relate to Office 365? This capability is core to deploying an information governance strategy both internally and externally to the cloud. What are the benefits?

Security, compliance, legal requirements, and data privacy can be more easily enforced before it becomes available on the cloud or classified within the cloud
Content can be automatically classified to organizational taxonomies within or outside of the cloud making the content available and easily found by stakeholders depending on their security access
Automatically removes and protects organizationally defined confidential/privacy content
Removes the subjectivity associated with erroneous meta tags and adds rich metadata to content without metadata
Encourages collaboration for geographically dispersed knowledge workers who can all access the most relevant content
Becomes an enabler for organizations to begin to make sense of text analytics for unstructured content

If you could eliminate end user tagging across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments to enable use/re-use and availability of the knowledge asset and that the integrity of the asset would be maintained would this be important to you?

Comments { 0 }

Cloud Services – You own it – you protect it!

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 10, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Data Security, Information Governance

Data privacy exposures happen all the time. Most go unreported. Data, either stored in the cloud or within your four walls is your responsibility. Most cloud vendors and cloud application vendors will provide some level of protecting your data, but for the most part you are on your own. Without adequate information on the security and compliance profile of the data, including its ownership, access controls, audits and classification, cloud initiatives can fall short of expectations and put sensitive data at risk. Understanding the data owners, the authorized users, and user activity is critical to garnering organizational input, which in turn, is critical to defining the security and compliance profile of the data for internal datacenter and for the cloud.

The other issue surrounds privacy/protection laws in different countries. Issues can arise such as privacy/protection laws among government, regional, and even local authorities. In some countries there are strict restrictions on whether information can be stored outside of the country. Privacy laws can differ widely depending on the country. If you have employees crossing geographical boundaries what must be done in each scenario to remain compliant with potentially widely different restrictions?

Jurisdiction matters immensely on where the data is stored, as different laws may be applicable across multiple jurisdictions. From a legal point of view, location matters. For example, if data is being stored off-shore the laws may not have any effect. Cloud vendors can store your information on a variety of servers across the world. For example, the Patriot Act in the US allows the government to subpoena all data stored within the country, the EU Data Protection Directive does not allow personal information to be transferred to any outside country, the Massachusetts Breach Law, US, specifies that citizens’ private information must be protected and has specified strict guidelines around storage, access, and transmission of personal information. A cloud environment by nature has no boundaries requiring careful thought on who might be accessing the content.

Another issue is who is to notify people of compromised personal data, the service provider or the organization? Who pays those costs? If an internal end user posts data that can be compromised, again who is responsible? It would appear that in all cases you are.

Comments { 0 }

Microsoft Cloud Services – We were just having a bad day. Oops, days.

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 10, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

Despite the fact that Microsoft has multiple datacenters located worldwide, with globally redundant, enterprise grade reliability with automatic failover and a strict privacy policy and a 99.9% financially backed Service Level Agreement (SLA), accidents do occur.

Moving to cloud based services is still considered risky, but the benefits seem to be outweighing the cons. But the cons can’t be ignored. Let’s first look at hackers. The increase in hacking is on the rise with nefarious gangs of hackers springing up globally and targeting the largest organizations. Major breaches at Google, Salesforce.com, Twitter, and Amazon have all proven that there are hidden costs and repercussions from compromised data.

But some outages and problems can be directly attributed to carelessness within the organization. Not to pick on Microsoft, February 23, 2013 was not a good day inside the walls of Redmond. First the world wide Azure cloud service went offline due to an expired security certificate. If that wasn’t bad enough, they discovered a malware infection on internal computers (already discovered and fixed by Twitter, Facebook, and Apple) had crept into Microsoft in-house systems. Add to that the continuing woes of security holes in Java. Although Java 7 was supposed to address these holes it appears that they continue.

A week or so later, Microsoft users went through a similar ordeal which mostly affected Hotmail, Outlook.com and SkyDrive — three of Microsoft’s more essential cloud services. The service interruption was caused primarily to Hotmail.com and Outlook.com when they “suffered from a service interruption caused by a firmware update which failed “in an unexpected way”, according to Microsoft’s Vice President Arthur de Haan. The failed firmware update occurred in one of Microsoft’s datacenters, in a “core part” of its physical plant, subsequently leading to a “substantial temperature spike in the datacenter”. The heat was “significant enough” causing the “safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter”. In that area of the datacenter Microsoft houses “parts of the Hotmail.com, Outlook.com, and SkyDrive infrastructure”.

In a just released update, Office 365/Outlook users and administrators are experiencing transition problems. The ‘fix’ for this supposedly non-disruptive transition is to verify the configuration on every device, which could be extremely cumbersome. Microsoft’s guidelines to Partners state: “In an effort to keep your service upgrade experience as seamless as possible, we suggest that you take a few minutes to validate that your current environment is configured properly. Prior to upgrade it is important that you verify your Autodiscover and MX records in DNS, as well as ensuring that your clients are up-to-date with the versions listed below. Failure to do so could result in your Outlook clients being unable to connect to their mailboxes after the Service Upgrade occurs.”

This isn’t necessarily indicative of Microsoft cloud services, as they are in the same boat as others. Should we just chalk it up to the organization having a few bad days? Or is oversight somewhat lax? Do these types of potential issues impact your decision when selecting a cloud application vendor?

Comments { 0 }

Office 365 – Aspirin versus a Headache?

By paulb@conceptsearching.com on April 8, 2013 in Blog, Cloud, Enterprise 2.0/Web 2.0

Microsoft is making a big push for Office 365 and is touting the savings being achieved by early adopters. Are the savings there? Sure they are. Organizations can reduce costs significantly. In a recent article in Information Week, ‘Office 365 Gets the Thumbs Up in Kansas City’, Kansas City is expected to reap a savings of $600K per year and have reduced their data center by 26 servers. A very compelling ROI.

Turning the page, let’s look at a different scenario. Approximately 45% of Internet users (not necessarily business users) still use Windows XP or Windows Vista. Guess what – Office 365 won’t work with either of those operating systems. Office on Demand has pretty stringent requirements too and requires Windows 7 or 8 and a modern browser. Have any Google users that would like to synch Gmail to Outlook 2013? A no go unless you use IMAP.

Although these drawbacks are not necessarily business problems, they are if you are analyzing the accessibility for multiple users (think hundreds to thousands) who have multiple PC configurations and the expected ROI. I have never run across a company where every user is using the same configuration and operating system, let alone are all up-to-date and current. Rather defeats the purpose of Office 365 if people can’t access it.

With the new and growing trend for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) I would be interested in knowing if you are considering Office 365 and if you have identified any issues with the potential mismatch of technical requirements for your end user devices? Has that swayed or delayed your decision?

Comments { 0 }

Haven’t moved to SQL Server 2012? Maybe now is the time.

By admin on March 18, 2013 in Big Data, Cloud, Enterprise Metadata Management

For those of you who haven’t taken advantage of SQL Server 2012 maybe now is the time. Although Concept Searching supports SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, and SQL Server 2012, SQL Server 2012 is hailed as a much more robust version and according to commentators is positioned to be a leader in availability and in the growing area of big data. With improved visual tools that allow users to view a database as a spreadsheet and access to the BI tools they need to transform information into business insights, Concept Searching products can take advantage of the new features found in SQL 2012 to aid in the management their unstructured content. SQL Server 2012 also offers the ‘cloud on your terms’. Since we support on-premise, cloud, or hybrid environments as well as Office 365 the use of SQL Server 2012 addresses the need for organizations to control their environment and control the pace to evaluate the cloud’s economic and scalability benefits.

To read the product brochure for conceptSQL, please click here.

Comments are closed

Throwing Security Over the Wall

By marting@conceptsearching.com on February 11, 2013 in Cloud, Data Security

Although it’s common knowledge that most cloud vendors do not accept responsibility of your data – you do. The Amazon AWS web services terms of service stipulate that the cloud vendor doesn’t accept liability for lost or altered data, and that customers are responsible for “taking your own steps to maintain appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Content, which may include the use of encryption technology to protect Your Content from unauthorized access and routine archiving Your Content.”

Ok, let’s assume the cloud vendor gets attacked by the ‘next generation of malware’ (like Flame) or just plain old gets compromised. Some may think they can retreat to the cloud vendor, who has already said they are not responsible for the safekeeping of your data.

Other issues can arise such as privacy/protection laws among government, regional, and even local authorities. In some countries there are strict restrictions on whether information can be stored outside of the country. If you look at the US only, privacy laws can widely differ depending on whether the environment is federal, state, or local.

Jurisdiction matters immensely on where the data is stored, as it may be applicable across multiple jurisdictions. From a legal point of view, location matters. For example, if data is being stored off-shore the US laws may not have any effect. Cloud vendors can store your information on a variety of servers across the world.

Interesting subject. Any thoughts or real-life experiences? Have you dealt with this issue with your cloud vendor if you have one?

Comments are closed