We are in the height of summer here at the moment, with regular daily temperatures around 30-35C. With the heat comes the risk of bush fires. Now this may not be of a concern to those of you living deep within the ‘burbs or in the inner heart of a city.
However for people such as myself that live close to large tracts of urban bushland or on the edge of suburbia, this is a very real and constant threat. During the summer months, you are constantly aware that you may have to evacuate with only a few minutes notice.
Cloud computing is all the buzz at the moment, another trendy topic, but it isn’t that new in relative terms, either is the SaaS models, having grown out of the ASP model of the last century.
But you know despite being immersed in all this web “stuff” from day to day, I just have this nagging feeling about the information we put out in the cloud. Is it really that safe!
At the Edge of Web Conference colleague Stephen Collins in his Enterprise 2.0 – A New Age of Aquarius? talk touched on the social aspect of SaaS and that most of his software that he uses is in the cloud. Leaving very little in terms of desktop software.
With the financial world in extreme crisis and various government running around in what can only be described as blind panic, one would could be forgiven for joining the mass panic. Granted that when the world economy does slide into recession that it is going to be tough generally.
However having been through three down turns I can give a few pointers that maybe helpful in these times of crisis. Particularly for people in Australia and New Zealand:
During the two conferences I attended recently, Web Directions South and OZ-IA there was a distinct theme in some the sessions on opening up the corporate knowledge based.
You know the score, you have bound to have heard this before. Don’t lock the corporate information up, allow those statistics and figures, you are already presenting to the public to be readily accessed via some type of API. Allow people to remix, mashup and represent the information. The concept goes that it’s better to allow this via a controlled API then have people scrape and represent or misrepresent the information. Hence you maintain control of your information using the API than the traditional scrape method.
