As SI said in our post on technology damnation 80, software was good. Hosted ASP was better. True multi-tenant SaaS was better still. But the “cloud” is, more often than not, the one step back that follows the two-steps forward.

The cloud is not a white fluffy cloud full of day dreams, it is a gathering storm cloud that could soon erupt and flood your entire operation while the hail it dispenses pummels you to a bloody pulp.

As per our damnation post, if you are not careful, you could:

• lose your mail,
• lose your data,
• lose your platform, and
• lose your customers as well as
• lose your supply chain visibility,
• lose your revenue stream, and
• lose all the cash in your bank account

And you could be permanently lost at sea when the floods carry you away.

Unless, of course, you take precautions. What kind of precautions? Every kind of precaution you can take. But at a minimum:

1. Make sure that your providers’ platforms are designed in such a way that not only is there no data cross-pollination, but that there is no access cross-pollination. This may require that the provider not only create a new instance for each client, but run it on a new virtual machine. (The database can be on one server, as long as it’s encrypted and the encryption for each client uses a unique key so that if a hacker gets through to the database through another client’s poor security configuration, and gets all the data for that client, your data can’t be decrypted.)
2. Make sure that the provider supports encryption across all of your data, not just parts of it, and that it is up to date (and up to snuff). Even data that might be considered inconsequential can be enough to be damaging if enough bits of it are pieced together.
3. Make sure the provider does near-real time incremental, replicated, distributed, off-site back-ups to make sure that, in the case of hardware failure (or FBI/NSA server seizure), your data is not lost.
4. Make sure the provider has multiple real-world data centres that the platform can be run on in case one (or more) data centres become unavailable.
5. Make sure the provider has a distributed fault-tolerant up-time monitoring solution that can detect if an application instance becomes unavailable and restore the most recent back-up to a different data centre and do the necessary re-routings in (near) real time.

In other words, security, fault-tolerance, and distributed processing and back-up are critical. Without it, you’ll be hacked, your system will go down, and you may not get it (or even your data) back.

The mobile movement, as we pointed out in technology damnation 75, is as much of a curse as it is a blessing. As we noted in our post:

• you will be expected to work anywhere, anytime;
• data entry will be painful as small screens, and smaller keyboards made for real mice, will be the norm (and you can thank Apple and their new mini 4″ iPhone); and
• task time will triple as small, limited power processors, chug, chug, chug trying to deal with media-heavy websites and bloated data transfer protocols despite the fact that
• suppliers and customers will expect a whole new level of relationship management

So what can you do?

• define your relationship management processes and protocols and make sure new suppliers and customers know, day one, what they can expect and the level, and kind, of service you will provide
• limit the amount of functionality that your applications will support on a mobile device to needed functionality
• make sure mobile applications and devices support scanning/sensor reading as much as possible (bar codes, QR codes, RFID chips, etc.); manual data entry should be web-based OCR (image, upload for server processing, user override, save); etc.
• make sure support channels are well defined so that only people who are working or on call get contacted when requests come in — don’t automatically route a non-critical support call to the primary rep at 3 am in the morning when a secondary support rep is on call half a world away at 3 pm in the afternoon (VOIP is a wonderful thing)

We’re stuck with these devices whether we like ’em or not, so let’s make sure we design for them appropriately and work-life boundaries are properly set, otherwise, we’ll all be asking:

Can I Play With Madness?

As SI said in our post on technology damnation 80, software was good. Hosted ASP was better. True multi-tenant SaaS was better still. But the “cloud” is, more often than not, the one step back that follows the two-steps forward.

The cloud is not a white fluffy cloud full of day dreams, it is a gathering storm cloud that could soon erupt and flood your entire operation while the hail it dispenses pummels you to a bloody pulp.

As per our damnation post, if you are not careful, you could:

• lose your mail,
• lose your data,
• lose your platform, and
• lose your customers as well as
• lose your supply chain visibility,
• lose your revenue stream, and
• lose all the cash in your bank account

And you could be permanently lost at sea when the floods carry you away.

Unless, of course, you take precautions. What kind of precautions?

1. Make sure that your providers’ platforms are designed in such a way that not only is there no data cross-pollination, but that there is no access cross-pollination. This may require that the provider not only create a new instance for each client, but run it on a new virtual machine. (The database can be on one server, as long as it’s encrypted and the encryption for each client uses a unique key so that if a hacker gets through to the database through another client’s poor security configuration, and gets all the data, your data can’t be decrypted.)
2. Make sure that the provider supports encryption across all of your data, not just parts of it, and that it is up to date (and up to snuff). Even data that might be considered inconsequential can be enough to be damaging if enough bits of it are pieced together.
3. Make sure the provider does near-real time incremental, replicated, distributed, off-site back-ups to make sure that, in the case of hardware failure (or FBI/NSA server seizure), your data is not lost.
4. Make sure the provider has multiple real-world data centres that the platform can be run on in case one (or more) data centres become unavailable.
5. Make sure the provider has a distributed fault-tolerant up-time monitoring solution that can detect if an application instance becomes unavailable and restore the most recent back-up to a different data centre and do the necessary re-routings in (near) real time.

In other words, security, fault-tolerance, and distributed processing and back-up are critical. Without it, you’ll be hacked, your system will go down, and you may not get it (or even your data) back.