Nicholas Carr wrote another post about the emerging world of giant data centres (yup, English-English spelling on this post as opposed to English-US) – Google’s Cloud – describing how Google wants to host all of our data and our applications. Microsoft is pursuing a similar strategy through its Live plans.
Whilst there are lots of advantages in going down the hosted route and handing over big chunks of your I.T. to a hosted data centre, plenty of large organisations are reluctant to let go of their data completely. Not just because of their own concerns about security and privacy (as long as employees can send unencrypted emails outside of the company – or just use their vocal chords – there is only so much you can do on that road) but also because of government and industry regulations that dictate responsibilities regarding data ownership. Some governments simply do not allow companies to host their data overseas. Whilst business and society may becoming increasingly globalised, governments still operate very much on a localised level.
But never mind all the government-related challenges, Salesforce has just demonstrated the much simpler concern voiced by many organisations, as reported in the Washington Post – Salesforce.com Acknowledges Data Loss. It appears that an employee fell foul of a phishing scam and accidentally handed over the keys to their customer database. Oops!
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