Episode 22: When the rain from the cloud is just your tears

The tale of Mat Honan's remotely wiped Apple products has now been committed to the lore of the Internet. But this tale as with any comes with a proviso that has long been the anchor of the 'superhero' story; "With great power comes great responsibility." Our reliance on technology as the super-hero in our modern life has set us up for spectacular falls, akin to any great fallen-hero story-arch.

We have great power in our hands with our smart phones, mobile devices, cloud-enabled hand-held & remote technologies, & yet we wield these powers with little to no real responsibility. Mat Honan originally supposed that his accounts were brute force attacked (something he later retracted), but days later we learn they weren't. He was the victim of social engineering; the attackers rang Apple support, managed to pass through their security protocols due to "Apple's centralised single user account approach."

Blaming Apple is easy, but the fact is we are seeing further centralisation of our online lives with more & more of our accounts & services being linked together via our Twitter, OpenID or Facebook accounts. Each node we link in this way just increases our vulnerability. With security compromises of user databases on the rise, our entire 'digital life' faces compromise from any one of the countless services we interlink.

But that's not even the bigger risk. Publicising information about ourselves in such a carefree manner on social networking sites gives 'hackers' (calling them this when we make it this easy for them denegrates those who are 'real' hackers) less work to do when searching for information to use against us in a social engineering scam, when they wish to target someone.

The real threats as a result of our digitalisation is not our own personal Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Tumblr accounts - the real risk is our employers, & our businesses. As we increase the drive towards BYOD, our personal & business accounts become increasingly intermingled, something Honan discovered when his employer Gizmodo experienced as part of his account compromise, where tweets from Gizmodo were sent by the hacker.

Very few security breaches today are carried out by brute force. Most are the net results of social engineering, or end user stupidity - the breaches of Irish Department of Foreign Affairs systems by people linked to Anonymous earlier this year showed that stupidity really was the over-arching issue, with passwords such as 'Password1', which demonstrated two failures;

1. A failure culturally within the Department of Foreign Affairs ICT to educate users about the security of ICT systems, & to ensure a clear understanding of the requirement to always operate a 'strong password' policy
2. A failure of the users themselves to understand that given the sensitivity of information they handle from where they work, that security should always be to the forefront of their thoughts when working within ICT systems

Security breaches are often where 'hacker' opportunism meets 'end user complacency'. I have always maintained that the biggest threat to any business is not external, but at every level inside a business, even more so at executive level. Social Networking as powerful a tool as it is for good to be used by us, can just as easily be turned against us at a moments notice.

To protect you from yourself, there are a few simple steps I would recommend & suggest:

• every time you "link" a social media account to another account or app, ask yourself "Am I really happy with this connection being made permanently? What's this company's history on security like?"
• If you authorise an app to link to one of your social networking accounts, regularily review that connection - if you don't find yourself using it often, revoke access until it is absolutely needed again - don't leave authorisations blindly open
• Who can view your social networking streams? How much information do the reveal about you? Perhaps the only people who should see your streams are those you know, & not the great wide world.
• Are your personal passwords themed with your work password choices? If they are, address it immediately. 
• Do you save passwords in your browsers, or directly in applications? If so, remove them. Then change your passwords.
• Is your password comprised of a word with numbers, even with capitals? If so, this is hacker101 from a dictionary list. Even words where letters are replaced with numbers are straight from hacker101; i.e. 'l33t' should ring a bell with most.
• Do you use the same password for multiple services? If so, this is a rookie mistake, & often how many online gamers accounts get compromised. Using the same password or variants of over & over is just putting you one step at a time closer to getting burned. Badly.
• Ask yourself can anything I reveal or have revealed on my social networking sites help lead someone to one or more of my passwords? If your answer is 'yes' or 'I'm not sure', you've a problem you need to address.

Episode 11: No, the answer is not 'Cloud'.

In the last week I've had some really interesting conversations about Cloud Computing with some acquaintences of mine. While a good portion focussed on the technical aspects such as the 'true' public cloud, what is perceived as public cloud, & the reality of public cloud actually really being private clouds, there was an aspect of the conversation that kept coming back up; market perception, marketing & of course, those all important sales numbers.

When I think of my own experience in selling cloud solutions to various people whether they were guys starting up a web-based business or cloud-services business, or media companies, or even large multinational businesses who were brave enough to jump into the Cloud, alot of the time the USP was the fact it was 'Cloud' & all that goes with that; scalability, utility resourcing/billing, resiliency etc etc.. That was all fine & good when it was solutions that were going head to head against traditional infrastructure-based solutions.

But, right now we're right at the cusp with a Cloud revolution already underway. The stories of 'I went Cloud, & my business went stratospheric also' while few & far between, do exist. But, we're now at the stage where 'Cloud' is no longer really acceptable as a USP. Nor is the ideal of 'Something-As-A-Service'. Something provided as a 'Cloud' must be a solution that gives a better quality of life as an end result.

A good example of how quality of life is almost of absolute paramount importance is 'Office365'. In Ireland, Microsoft are pushing this like crazy with radio advertisements etc., of how you too can have your office in the Cloud (I realise this is something I covered in a blog in June, but I'll not labour on this point too much). Microsoft Office is the most widely used piece of Officeware right across the Globe whether it's home users, business users or students. In short, it's been a stalwart product for the Redmondians. It does exactly what you need at every level of user from basic to power user alike.

Now, the argument for Office365 is compelling; no longer worry about keeping your office software up-to-date, access your office software & documents anywhere & so on. They tell you front & centre with the marketing it's office in the cloud. Now that's all very well, but how does the quality of life of moving from say a desktop office license to Office365 work for a basic, low end user of Office? The quality of life is practically non-existent if they move to Office365 from a desktop license of Office.

In trying to be clever, Redmond totally missed the point of why Google Docs is successful, & that the Googleplexians have absolutely nothing to fear, & why they are more likely to convert people from desktop versions of Microsoft Office to Google Docs. Microsoft made their product ridiculously difficult to use, totally unintuitive, & giving users as a result a total disimprovement in their quality of life. The pricing model is difficult to get to grips with & small businesses are going to be 'living on a prayer' when it comes to support (online forum support will not make Bob from SmallBusiness Ltd 'feel the love').

It just looks more like Balmer signed off on a project for the sake of it being a Microsoft contribution to the growing Cloud market in a desperate attempt to try keep up with more agile, inspired & user savvy solution providers out there. In essence, cloud for clouds-sake. If big guys like Microsoft are getting this so blatently wrong, then the odds are very rich that smaller companies with an eye on some of the change off the lower end of that big USD$150bn market valuation too are heading for a rude awakening.

I think the example of Microsoft Office365 as 'businesses embracing the cloud' is a really poor example. The numbers of businesses placing their e-mail with Google's G-mail, or people using SalesForce, or the business adoption rates for Apple's iPad & ultimately their use of iTunes' Cloud services are far more telling, but they're not 'sexy stories' that sell magazines, or business news section, or Cloud monthly periodicles online or in paperform.

The truth here really is Cloud in its integration & deployment should be almost anonymous or go un-noticed. That is the absolute true point to & of cloud computing; scaleable, easy deployment without any impact on the end user or them noticing. I mean, yes there are the self-agrandising press-releases of 'Hey, we went cloud, we're awesome & now our customers are awesome too!'. That's par for the course, & shouldn't be mistaken for an indicator for success, or an indication for the existence of a Cloud solution making people's lives better.

For some people Cloud is part of a solution, or not even a solution at all, as the problem with Cloud is that at a certain point in your scaling, the cost becomes absolutely prohibitive, & the technological ability to scale becomes a joint issue of technological & fiscal prohibition. Cloud adoption must be about more than a solution for now to a business, it must be about how it will serve the business now, next week, next month, next year & even in the next five years.

Moving platforms is expensive, costly, is fraught with many things that can hurt your business. If you're trying to shave costs right now, ask yourself what are the costs to get off the platform you're moving to, & what are the lock-ins to your growth using it. Saving cents that ultimately costs you dollars or euros later is not good economy. Do not be bullied into going cloud because the 'sales guy says so'. Sometimes the sales guy just wants to 'A.B.C.' (Always Be Closing), & knows the longer term revenue from you on their platform is more important to him than to your business. Solutions must be the square peg for the square hole, not a sphere that happens to also fit that hole.

Episode 8: A guy walks into a bar & orders a beer with his Cloud

I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Go-Oodles at one of the Google offices in Dublin, where I was also introduced to the Chromebook, which is due to hit our shores in July through the guys at Go Oodles. The Chromebook is Google's chosen fighter to enter the ring against Apple's leviathan iPad, which has decimated the competition in the tablet market after initially being scorned by some upon its introduction, & sold like crazy, where you can't even get one in a PC World outlet unless you're there on a Tuesday morning when they get their fresh deliveries of them!

Some have asked why Google are even going down this road considering the spectacular problems facing their Android platform. The issues facing Android are in fact absolutely no fault of Google's, but the poor exposition of Android by handset makers, carriers & what those aforementioned pair have done with their own respective implementations of Android, & also that there's less choice in the way of Apps as a result, as application developers make more money per App from iOS apps than Android ones.

Even in my own experience with my own Android tablet, saw me unable to load a great deal many applications from the official Android Market, because the applications were meant for Android Phones, not tablets. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've actually never used a full unmolested version of Android from Google. Yet I know when I pick up an iOS device; I can have any flavour I want, as long as it's Apple.

But, I'll digress at this point about that as this is not a blog about tablet computing, or Android VS iOS, but how tablet computing is in fact going to lead the march into the cloud, lemming style. While the enterprise is slowly moving into the Cloud, the consumer market is there, front & centre, & the push is persistent, kept simple & enabled by peple like Google, Microsoft, Apple, & Amazon.

Each of these players is involved with some consumer hardware that pushes people with ease into the Cloud & the use of cloud services. I pick up an iPad now, I no longer need a computer to activate it, & I can get straight into the iTunes Cloud to consume as much or as little as I like, & then shove what I want back up into iCloud.

I open up a Chromebook, find a wifi connection, I can work in Google Docs, check my Gmail, & listen to my music up in Amazon's Sound Drive, even watch videos out of YouTube. I can lose my Chromebook, or it break, I can contact Google, or a designated Google partner, & I'm right back there, no data lost, no more 'ah crap, I forgot to back X or Y up!'

Budweiser recently introduced an iPhone app that will track then temperature near where I am & give me cut-price beer in a local bar, or a free drink should it reach a certain temperature. The Cloud is bringing me cheap, or free beer. WOW!  If you stood up at a Cloud Computing conference, or talk & made the statement of 'Cloud can even bring free beer to the masses' you would not only be laughed at, but questioned as to whether you yourself perhaps had too much beer.

Within every 'Cloud' company right now there is a drive to push adoption & sales like crazy. Executives are demanding numbers. Sales guys are hitting the market hard & aggressively. In some cases, the numbers are coming up short. Routes to market are being reviewed, messages being tweaked, even the offerings are getting changed, or re-imagined for re-marketing.

The successes in enterprise cloud right now are coming hard & fast in areas of software as a service, like e-mail, officeware or CRM's. These are the real fast quick wins for business consumer and service provider. Large complex migrations are never going to shorten down into exec-friendly boardroom pleasing sales cycles.

People are looking at companies like Google, SalesForce, Marketo, Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Apple & wondering why their Cloud offerings are not beating the paths to revenue like these guys are. These guys defined cloud. They were not only born from it, but pretty much defined it respectively. They fulfill the basic needs immediately, don't require much action in terms of market persuasion for people to beat a path to their door, & allow easy, non-fussy consumption of their services.

When you think of them you don't think 'Cloud service'. You don't find yourself asking 'okay, how does their cloud work'. 'How do I benefit from them?' You don't even find yourself really having to do much thinking at all to be on their cloud. And yet each of these guys despite being very active in the enterprise market, is exponentially more active in the average joe's life.

Countless droves of your every-man or every-woman has a G-mail or Hotmail account. Hundreds of millions of us have Apple iPods, or iPhones, or iPads (indications are a huge number have one or more of these devices or even all three!). Alot of us have bought products via Amazon's store, & alot of use SalesForce at our work. And as for Google, a billion unique visits per month across their services says it all.

Amazon are even in the process of introducing their own low-cost tablet computer, which some  seem to think will deliberately be sold at or below cost so they can storm into the market & east into Apple's share, & grab those who are still unconvinced by Apple's pricing. This tablet is also believed to also tie neatly into Amazon's AppStore, Cloud Drive & own online store with ease. Further making the push into cloud via consumer devices.