Jay Heiser

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Entries Categorized as 'Cloud'


Megaupload and SaaS Escrow

by Jay Heiser  |  February 15, 2012  |  Submit a Comment

Other than some analysis and speculation about how the takedown changed traffic patterns without actually reducing global piracy, and regular reports about the legal status of Kim Dotcom, the Megaupload drama hasn’t provided much in the way of news for a couple of weeks. On the theory that putting the string ‘Megaupload’ into the title of [...]

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Category: Cloud Vendor Contracts risk management     Tags: , ,

Megaupload is world’s biggest hot potato

by Jay Heiser  |  February 3, 2012  |  1 Comment

The dozens of petabytes of Megaupload data belonging to millions of Internet users is manifesting itself as a giant hot potato, currently burning a cashflow and PR hole into the bottom lines of several global hosting firms.

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Category: Cloud risk management security     Tags: ,

Megaupload’s Black Swan Song

by Jay Heiser  |  February 1, 2012  |  Comments Off

Last November, Gartner analyst Richard Hunter and I published research entitled ‘Black Swans’ Are Sure to Fly in the Public Cloud.  Based on ideas popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Random House, 2007), we strongly urged the users of cloud-based services to plan for the possibility of ”severe failure with [...]

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Category: Cloud risk management security     Tags: ,

Mega Retrieval

by Jay Heiser  |  January 31, 2012  |  Comments Off

Leverage and scale are two of the most fascinating aspects of Cloud Computing. In one fell swoop, the US Department of Justice burst Megaupload’s cloud, sending a loud anti-piracy message.

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Category: Cloud security     Tags: ,

How much of your data is lost at Megaupload?

by Jay Heiser  |  January 30, 2012  |  4 Comments

It is almost certainly the case that individuals within thousands of organizations, having decided that Megaupload was a useful service, had uploaded corporate data into it. If that data wasn’t backed up, it is probably gone for good.

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Category: Cloud security     Tags: ,

The Peril of Parallel Passwords

by Jay Heiser  |  December 23, 2011  |  2 Comments

Demanding that users not write down their passwords is a quarterly opportunity to send the message that security policy is a useless bureaucratic exercise.

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Category: Cloud IT Governance risk management security     Tags: ,

Is a cloud safer than a mattress?

by Jay Heiser  |  December 1, 2011  |  1 Comment

Its been suggested more than once that avoiding public cloud computing is tantamount to keeping your money in a mattress. Given what’s happened over the last 4 years, why would anyone automatically assume that the use of banks represents a low level of risk?

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Category: Cloud risk management security     Tags: ,

Bulletproof Contracts

by Jay Heiser  |  November 28, 2011  |  2 Comments

With the understanding that I am not a lawyer, and Gartner is not a law firm, here’s my brief summary of the contractual language dealing with SaaS security as provided by a prominent vendor: We believe that we obey the law.  If there are any questions pertaining to how your data is handled within our [...]

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Category: Cloud Vendor Contracts risk management security     Tags:

SLA feather allows you to fly in the cloud

by Jay Heiser  |  November 17, 2011  |  2 Comments

An SLA from a public cloud service promising some sort of recoverability is a crow feather, clutched in the trunk of the enterprise elephant, providing them the false courage to be willing to fly in the public cloud.

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Category: Cloud Vendor Contracts risk management     Tags: , , , , ,

Data without Borders: DRM as a consumer lock-in mechanism

by Jay Heiser  |  November 9, 2011  |  1 Comment

In the olden days, the business viability of your local book store had absolutely no impact on your ability to read whatever you might have bought from them. In the digital world, your continued ability to use rights-managed content, be it music, video, or books, is completely dependent upon the willingness and ability of a service to support it on your device.

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Category: Applications Cloud risk management security     Tags: , ,