Ard gedeelde items

Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Cost and benefit of your cloud application on Azure - Part 1

While exploring posibilities of cloud development I often stumble upon a lot of questions and some fragmented answers. It is an exiting project in which we turn existing on premise and partly classic hosted functionality into a cloud service. Main concern and focus on these kind of developments for our company for me is the viability of the business model. The way to investigate this is from a platform architecture and design patterns angle that influence the resulting application in several ways.

Part of that is of course cost, but this has to be considered in combination with technical issues as scalability, flexibility, performance and security for instance. Techonolgical innovation is business innovation and thus expanding opportunities, rather than just operations. Again, Azure is NOT about technology.
Moving an application to the cloud can be (seem to be) pretty straight forward. Starting with an existing application you can map several functionalities to this pure cloud based version of that application. Two basic considerations of this quick and dirty approach come to mind.
  1. If not designed for the cloud, the application will not benefit from the promisses of the cloud. So flexibility and scalability can be less than expected.
  2. Second when not properly designed the cost of the Cloud application can be unpredictably high. Promises that Cloud applications should be able to not only move from CAPEX to OPEX but potential have a better TCO will never meet expectations.
So for me is looking at the development of a new business model also overseeing the technical implications and map these on the current knowledge and competences of our development teams. When moving from the technical design and development of the application, the business model as a whole is designed too. This means a very broad look on the possibilities, market requirements, added value, deployment and delivery models, development roadmaps, pricing etc. All these considerations have to be mapped on the available resources and channels. When driving new business models an extra complexity is the changing knowledge and competences needed to run this business.

Monday, April 04, 2011

Security breach McKinsey - email adresses exposed after unauthorized entry of mail system service provider

Last week McKinsey send a note to users from which email information was exposed due to unauthorized entry into the system of their email service provider.

Important information from McKinsey Quarterly


We have been informed by our e-mail service provider, Epsilon, that your e-mail address was exposed by unauthorized entry into their system. Epsilon sends e-mails on our behalf to McKinsey Quarterly users who have opted to receive e-mail communications from us.


We have been assured by Epsilon that the only information that was obtained was your first name, last name and e-mail address and that the files that were accessed did not include any other information. We are actively working to confirm this. We do not store any credit card numbers, social security numbers, or other personally identifiable information of our users, so we can assure you that no such information was accessed.


Please note, it is possible you may receive spam e-mail messages as a result. We want to urge you to be cautious when opening links or attachments from unknown third parties. Also know that McKinsey Quarterly will not send you e-mails asking for your credit card number, social security number or other personally identifiable information. So if you are ever asked for this information, you can be confident it is not from McKinsey.


We regret this has taken place and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We take your privacy very seriously, and we will continue to work diligently to protect your personal information.

McKinsey & Company

Nice little note from McKinsey, but makes you wonder or a little worried. I'm not the man who is worried lightly when it comes to security. Technology is becoming better every day, people are the biggest threath to security and security breaches will be there no matter what measures taken. Fact.

I do admire this gesture of openess by McKinsey. There was a problem and we are sorry is basicaly the message. We will take action to be sure your privacy is secure is what they tell you.

Some uncertainty stays behind. It gets into your head. Although there seems to be no harm done, no important information leaked, but security is all about fear and trust.