HostGator is Safe Harbour Certified

Image via CrunchBase

According to a recent HostGator May 2010 Newsletter, they are now Safe Harbor Certified.

Though this isn’t directly related to cloud computing.  It is interesting in that is shows hosting services in USA are becoming sensitive to the fact that overseas privacy regulation and concerns are more stringent than those imposed by USA.

In Australia, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) is apparently still not fully comfortable with the private information of customers of Prudential Wealth Management heading overseas.  You can read here about how the jury (APRA) is still out on whether or not they are comfortable with Prudential’s plans to use Salesforce.com which is hosted in the USA.

I am not aware of any agreement between Australia and USA or other country that is similar to the EU – USA Safe Harbour agreement.  The most likely place we need to establish such an agreement with is Singapore as that appears to be the target hosting site for the big clouds (Amazon, Azure) in Asia region.

Security in the Cloud

A while back I blogged on security in the cloud – whose data is it in the cloud.  I’ve recently been more interested in this topic and come across an article from the Application Development Trends.

Cryptographers Warn About Security Dangers in the Cloud at RSA

In the article there was –

predicted a “trust meltdown” for the security industry if that doesn’t change. “We have complex operations in place in tightly intertwined systems, and the processes are not well understood or analyzed, but they are widely used and trusted. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

But it did not proceed to explain what precisely these vulnerabilities are.  I cannot discern whether this is simple fear mongering or if indeed, we are all little “Alices with a key” hoping our data is secure in the cloudy wonderland.

Turnkey Grails

When I discovered Turnkey Linux, which I think is awesome, an light bulb came on about how virtual machines can be extremely useful for me.  In my work, I may switch frequently from one activity to another.  Each of these activities require a different software tool set.  In the past I would accommodate this by installing all the different tools I need onto my desktop at work.  Then, if I wanted to do some work on my home laptop, I’d find myself reinstalling the same set of tools.  Obviously this isn’t the most effective way to work.

I have never spent much time working with virtual machines because I really thought they were most useful to vendor or pre-sales guys who need to demo a complete stack of technologies without having to install them at a given site.

Turnkey Virtual Appliance is Brilliant

I have just come into the opportunity to buy a small business that, among other things, will immediately need a new web site.  From my other posts you’ll gather I’m an IT guy.  But lately I’ve not been so hands on.  I’m working in Strategy and Architecture.  I have in the past setup the LAMP stack on a spare home PC, one step at a time.  Now I’m thinking more like a user than a techie.  I don’t want the thrill of understanding every little config file under /etc and what it does.  I also don’t want to mess with an old PC.  I have my Macbook Pro and I certainly don’t want to mess it up.

In the Cloud, whose data is it?

I just attended a promotional event by NetSuite in Sydney.

When I got back to the office and started speaking with a colleague about how interesting the NetSuite proposition is, he conveyed to me a horror story he had recently heard about a Cloud or SaaS Customer.  It was a small business who had all there business records / erp / gl in the SaaS application and for some reason decided it was time to move on to another solution.  Trouble came when they requested their data and the supplier said, “it’s not your data, it’s mine.”

Shock horror I thought.  This is supposed to simplify the world for SME’s but now they’re going to need a crack legal team to protect them from the evil cloud. I was a bit shocked at this prospect, so decided to do a little research – kind of a snopes or myth busters act on this loss of ownership of one’s vital business data in the Cloud.  Here’s what I found.

You cannot delegate responsibility