07/09/2009 01:32:50 PM EST

good job

United States dad

07/09/2009 03:28:52 PM EST

"At least in our cloud, nothing will prevent them from constructing applications that are HIPAA- or PCI- [Peripheral Component Interconnect] compliant, [a] process that includes our technology as part of the [processing] chain," Coffee said. PCI stands for Payment Card Industry, not Peripheral Component Interconnect. Better not to spell the acronym out than to spell it out incorrectly.

United StatesAcronym Police

07/09/2009 04:04:12 PM EST

This is a nicely written article. One issue that was missed, but lightly danced around, is "Data Escrowing" for SAAS and Cloud applications. Escrowing is basically a contract between three parties.. the provider... the customer... and an independent third-party escrow company. These types of arrangements are complicated. In short... the third-party stores a copy of the providers source code AND database information for the customer. If something "bad" happens (the provider goes under, the service is down for a long period of time, etc) then the third-party will release the source code and customer data, in some preconceived methodology. We, as a technology liability consulting firm, see some potential problems with escrowing. Without going into too much detail... your data is still housed by third-party groups that you don't control, off-site, away from your day-to-day operation. And escrowing does not remove the problem of your data being housed by a group that is solely focused on the arrival of your next payment. Now.. we are absolutely not saying that Cloud / SaaS is bad. We, like the author of this article, are simply saying... do your homework first. Sadien Staff Sadien, Inc. http://www.sadien.com

United StatesSadien, Inc. (Sadien.com)

08/13/2009 02:36:49 PM EST

I work for an ISV called RainStor that launched a cloud archive service a few months ago. We have focused on the business problem of application retirement initially by delivering a service that allows companies to preserve historical data from legacy applications in the cloud. However, we’ve also been asked by many customers, partners, commentators and analysts how our cloud archive service can be used for “SaaS data escrow”. We’re keen to understand in more detail why and how companies might use cloud archive services to keep a copy of the data within their SaaS applications so we’re running a survey. The survey is available at http://tinyurl.com/kl5l86 and we share the results with anyone who particpates.

United KingdomJulian Cook