French Caldwell

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Entries from February 2009

Cloud Computing Risks

February 25th, 2009 · 1 Comment

Every time I hear of a web services failure, like the Google Mail crash yesterday, I’m reminded of a vendor briefing that my colleague Jay Heiser and I received from a small enterprise GRC platform vendor, Xactium, a few weeks ago.  Xactium has built a GRC cloud computing solution on salesforce’s force.com platform — a [...]

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Don’t Let Sunk Costs Sink You

February 19th, 2009 · 1 Comment

One risk that IT and business leaders have a hard time with intellectually is rationalizing sunk costs for a project that in a recession they never would have started in the first place.  “We’ve spent all this money — we can’t just throw it away.”
Oh, yes you can!
You gotta throw it away before the project [...]

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New Public Policy Issues Arise from Satellite Collision

February 12th, 2009 · No Comments

This Bloomberg report on the first ever collision between two satellites, a collision of U.S. and Russian satellites on 11 Feb, reminded me of the story of the first automobile collision in the U.S.  Allegedly the only two cars in Illinois in the early 1890s collided at an intersection.  At the time, there would have [...]

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Watch Out for Transparency

February 9th, 2009 · 2 Comments

Transparency is all well and good in theory, but in practice here is how it works:
First the auditors want to know if we have the required device to measure time, so we show them that we have a watch:

but then the auditors tell us we have to have more detail, so we show them that the watch face has numbers and [...]

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Vendor Risk Management 101

February 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

A quote from a posting by Larry Dignan on ZDNet:
“Without any diversification companies are at risk. In this respect, all companies should diversify a little. Say Windows is attacked and effectively wiped out. The all-Windows shop is wiped out too. But if that company is 80 percent Windows, 15 percent open source and 5 percent [...]

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