I do a range of different things from day to day, so you could read about pretty much anything in here. With any luck, it will be worth your time, and might even save you money!
Read, enjoy and comment …
Can you TRUST in Cloud Computing?
This is a question that comes up fairly frequently – if everything is in the ‘cloud’ what happens if something goes wrong? What happens if I lose my internet connectivity, or what happens if the provider loses my data?
These are valid concerns, of course, but the move to cloud services is happening. Can you afford to ignore it, and are you missing opportunities by not considering cloud solutions, or “Software As A Service” (SAAS)?
As with anything you do in your business (I hope) you need to do a bit of due diligence, and I’ve set out a little acronym to help you with some of the key areas you need to consider – appropriately enough, it’s all about TRUST:
T – transparency
R – reliability
U – usage limitations
S – security
T – terms and conditions of trading
These five key areas give you a broad scope by which to measure potential providers, and cover areas that you need to be asking questions about. Here’s a bit more detail:
Transparency:
- Cloud solution providers should explain their information handling and data storage practices in a clear and concise manner.
- Check whether their websites and marketing material include information about the reliability of their services, preferably independently measured.
- A definitive list of countries in which customer data may be stored or where applications may be hosted should be provided, and this is especially important if you are concerned with any element of Data Protection. Some vendors can’t or won’t guarantee which country your data will be stored in, which is not always acceptable.
Reliability:
- A clear indication ought to be available of the uptime and downtime of all the cloud services, as well as any security or system issues that may have occurred.
- If there has been any sort of security breach in the past, this should have been notified to customers immediately.
- Verify the backup policy of the provider, and the policy concerning the duty of care of the customer data should be clear and concise.
Usage Limitations:
- Providers of cloud solutions should claim no automatic rights of any kind over customer data. Data should be used purely to fulfil the obligations of the software – for example, calculations or other activities that form part of the provided solution – or to meet statutory or regulatory requirements, such as the online posting of VAT returns.
- All the data within a customer’s instance of the cloud solution should be made available for download in some standard format, should the customer require it.
- Cloud providers should disclose customer data to a third party only with explicit permission of the customer, or if required to do so by law. Any legal claim from a third party to access the data should be notified to the customer immediately and before any such disclosure is made, so the customer has the opportunity to challenge the request.
- Some providers may reserve the right to use some client data anonymously for bench-marking. Make sure you understand what is involved here, and be sure that you are happy with the policy. In general, it’s a useful thing to many businesses as a performance indicator, so don’t discount it out of hand, but be careful.
Security:
- Cloud service providers should protect customer data via internationally accepted and visible information security standards, like ISO 27002.
- All security management standards and processes should be audited by third-party auditors to ensure compliance, and the outcomes of these audits should be made available to customers, at least, if not publicly on the provider’s website.
- Such disclosures should also include information about how any issues raised in the audit are being addressed, and within what timeframe.
Terms and Conditions of Trading:
- The main message here is to actually read them!
- There should be a clear, concise and comprehensive set of terms agreed between the provider and the customer. These terms should set out defined areas of responsibilty and accountability, with the aim of avoiding disputes about who is liable shoudl some problem occur.
- Typically, these disputes will arise owing to either service provision or availability, or data loss or mismanagement. A key area, however, is privacy and security – the control of who has access to what elements of the system, and how that access is policed. The customer should be in control of the security relating to their own users, and the provider should deal with the wider issues of data protection and security.
- This agreement also need to make it clear where the responsibility for Data Protection compliance lies. Be careful of the small print, obviously!
Hopefully, if you can satisfy yourself on most of the issues mentioned above, you should have found a competent service provider. Each business has its own needs, however, and this list of suggestions is far from exhaustive, but I hope it will get you started, and will help you to build TRUST in cloud computing as a technology.
Happy hunting!
Keep old domains active and forwarded – here’s why!
I received an email from my website contact page recently, and rang the person up. It was a totally ‘cold’ contact in that I had never met the person, and there was no reason why we would know each other, so I asked how she had found my site.
The response was that she had searched in Google for “checklist for IT Director”, and somewhere among the returned results was a link that took her through to my site, and as a result of what she saw there she very kindly got in touch.
Excellent stuff – we had a good conversation and, like with all these things, you never know where it may lead.
However, I was intrigued by the “checklist for IT Director” thing, because as far as I am aware, neither the term “checklist” nor “IT Director” appear on my website currently, and have not for some time. So I decided to investigate further, with intriguing results.
A couple of years ago, I did do some marketing around the virtual/ outsourced IT Director model, and as part of that process I had a Twitter account in the name of @it_director. I put out a couple of dozen tweets on this account over a few months, and the last one was over a year ago in January 2010.
One of the tweets I had put out concerned a checklist (can you see where this is going?) for various issues, in this case whether or not you should block automatic updates for Internet Explorer 8! This was in March 2009, and contained a link to a long-dead page, on a website that I no longer use.
Happily, I had maintained the domain, and pointed it to my current site, so when the link was clicked, up came Expedio and the contact was established. So the moral appears to be that you should always ensure that any domains you link to from Twitter, or any other forum postings or social media activity are redirected if you close the website. You just never know – in a few years time, someone may stumble across one of your current tweets, even if it’s actually totally irrelevant to what they were looking for, and click on the link.
Stranger things have happened …
Do It Properly the First Time!
Here’s a post with a moral, which has been brought to mind by the recent failure of our oven …
Perhaps I’m losing you, so let’s start at the beginning. A few days ago, our oven stopped heating up properly, and we took the decision to replace it, given that we have already repaired it a couple of times over the seven or eight years we’ve been using it.
During the purchasing process it came to light that we needed to have it hard-wired into the electricity supply now, owing to changes in the regulations. Our existing oven, along with its companion combination microwave, is plugged into a wall socket behind the fixture.
So a shiny new oven was delivered yesterday, and the electrician duly turned up to do the necessary wiring. We switched off the 30amp cooker circuit at the fusebox, so you can imagine our surprise when on our return to the kitchen the light on the microwave was still on!
An investigation of all the sockets in the kitchen revealed that the dishwasher and a freezer were plugged into this 30amp circuit (with a socket intriguingly positioned beneath the sink), whereas the oven and combination microwave have been operating off the standard ring-main since the kitchen was installed! It also emerged that the electronic ignition for our gas hob was powered by this circuit too.
Well – obviously this will necessitate a slightly bigger job than anticipated in terms of wiring up the oven, but a number of things have come to mind since yesterday:
Firstly, if I hadn’t decided to do the job properly, and call the electrician, I could have just fitted a plug to my new higher-powered oven and started using it. Besides invalidating the warranty on the oven, if I was unlucky enough not to blow the fuses I would probably end up burning the house down!
Secondly, the ‘professionals’ who installed the kitchen for the previous owners of the house were clearly muppets, having breached all sorts of regulations, I would imagine, even 10 years ago. What sort of idiot would simply fail to move the supply approximately seven feet to the right? It’s on the same wall, so would have been very easy to do – it’s not as if you’d have a major issue running the cables.
So I can see some morals here, which do have a business application (so we get there eventually!) and are worth thinking about if you are embarking on something new, or planning some changes in your operation.
1. Don’t cut corners – plan properly, and don’t be tempted to take shortcuts. If you do, not only could you have a problem in the short term, but also you will be discovered in the end, even if it takes ten years!
2. Make sure that the people doing the work are competent, and try and find some way of checking that they have delivered what they claim. They will also be rumbled eventually, but after ten years you can’t do anything about it.
So, excuse a slightly bizarre post, but there is a bit of relevance there!
Business or Technology – which are you into?
I see a lot of forum threads where the question has been asked, “How do you identify the best partner to do x, y and z for your business?” The focus of the responses to threads like this is always interesting.
One common question is about web design, and the answers often concentrate on the distinction between designers and coders. The generalisation is usually that designers are concerned with form over function, and developers or coders are the opposite. However, the focus of both of these is on the creation of the site itself, in whatever form it takes.
Another common query is about CRM – how do you identify the best system? Again, responses revolve around features of particular solutions, often based on the respondent’s experiences with a given solution.
What intrigues me about all of these threads is the fact that people are often not looking at the business for which the solution is required. Websites and CRM systems are not like cars or washing machines – you don’t just buy one that you like the look of because you know that whatever you buy it will drive you from A to B, or wash your clothes. The solution you need in terms of technology for your business is one that you can work with, and which will deliver what you need with minimal impact on the way you operate.
You have to start from the business end, and look at all the processes and aims and personalities involved (yes, personalities are important!) and then start to look for the solutions to meet the business need. When you are buying insurance or a mortgage, you need a broker that has access to the whole of the market, and can therefore pick the best option to suit your needs.
Why then, when you need a new CRM system or website, do you go straight to the provider, rather than through a ‘broker’ who can help you to ensure that the final solution is a fit for the business? Many business owners are not technologists, so this type of support is vital, and can save huge amounts of time and money in the end.
A year or two ago, I saw a statistic that said that a significant percentage of CRM implementations fail to deliver. I suspect that this is because the systems selected were not a good fit for the business, as opposed to them being bad systems. The advice of someone with nothing specific to sell, and an objective opinion as to the way to get what you want and need, could be worth more than you think.
It was all down to a big fat zero!
Boy – have I had a frustrating time this week?
The dreaded problem of inconsistent results reared its head on a project – sometimes we got the right and expected results, and other times it failed. This is always a tricky one, as it often points to a data problem rather than a procedural one, and can be hard to track down.
So, I spent some hours going through all the queries and procedures – extracting the code for each one, and running them manually and all seemed fine. I’d bung in the parameters, and away it went – no issues, and the correct result every time as far as I could tell. Yet when the process was run through the application, we’d get wrong answers.
This morning I found the problem. We had a query built within the application code, one element of which was to collect some data from a table based on the year. The query parameter was built by appending a two digit year number to the end of the field name – so ‘pop09′, ‘pop10′ and so on.
The code contained a variable that held the year number selected by the user, and this variable was the problem. It was defined as an integer, and not a string (a legacy from an earlier version of the code) so therefore if you selected 2010, it would store 10 and everything would be fine – however, 2009 would end up as 9 instead of 09, and the process failed.
This explained how the queries worked when I ran them manually, because of course I was providing the correct 09 parameter, so this bug snuck through that stage, but we got it in the end – it had nowhere to hide!
So a fine example of how a zero (especially a leading one) can turn out to be a lot more important than it looks.
