Zen 2.0

CIO.com has an interesting article on The Truth About Software as a Service (SaaS). It highlighted the fact that most CIOs are still quite cautious when it comes to adopting SaaS. Here’s when SaaS doesn’t make sense: If the application is a competitive differentiator, because everyone will get the same application; If heavy customization is [...]

Throughout the CloudCamp sessions, most people discussed cloud computing as infrastructure in the cloud. People talk about the advantage of not having to procure and configure physical servers. People talk about the elasticity and utility factors of the cloud. People talk about scalability of the cloud. But not once, at least in my conversations, did [...]

Reuven Cohen, Dave Nielsen, Sam Charrington and a group of awesome volunteers organized a very successful CloudCamp event last night. This was organized in 3.5 weeks, which is an amazing feat. The event probably attracted 200-300 people. You can see some of the pictures of the event on flickr. The format was an unconference. There [...]

Another very interesting and popular discussion thread in the cloud-computing Google group on the Issues of data in the cloud. There are really two main topics in the discussion: Security and privacy issues around data in the cloud, which I have some detailed write up on here and here Moving the data into the cloud [...]

This is part 2 of the tough security questions for SaaS providers. In part 1 of the series, we asked the following questions: 1. Data Locality – Where’s my data? 2. Data Segregation – How is my data segregated with other customers, potentially my competitors? 3. Data Access – Who can access my data in [...]

Mike Kavis, aka madgreek65, did an interesting 7-minute video blog on the topic of cloud computing where he explains his view of it as well as explaining the risks. He then followed up with a blog post on The future is in the Clouds. In the video blog, Mike tried to explain why customers shouldn’t [...]

There’s a very interesting discussion thread happening in the cloud-computing group on “Follow the law” computing.. James Urquhart first started the discussion asking why not consider moving workload to wherever the current task is “most legal” using a combination of database sharding, database replication and vmotion/livemotion. A lively discussion followed and there are opinions from [...]

Good set of slides from Slideshare, by John Overton, on best practices for building a SaaS company, via bitcurrent. | View | Upload your own Moving to SaaS Another slide deck from bitcurrent. It looks at the perils and best practices of moving an application from internally-run to software-as-a-service. | View | Upload your own [...]

IT Finance Connection had an interesting podcast with Ariel Kelman, Salesforce.com’s senior director of platform product marketing. Ariel made a number of interesting points in the podcast: SaaS is good for companies and IT organizations that want to increase focus from infrastructure to innovation. IT organizations should consider SaaS applications just like other applications and [...]

We will be writing a series of blog posts on the tough questions that SaaS providers can expect to get from customers or they should ask themselves. The questions will span many different areas including security, compliance, sales, marketing and operations. This is Part 1 of the security questions. As we mentioned previously here, one [...]