All posts tagged Cloud Computing

We’re on the verge of a New Information Age. The old one has been around for thirty years or more, and it’s legacy is not all that wonderful. There’s been an explosion in the volume of data produced, sent and stored on servers, desktops and laptops around the world. Companies have tried to manage by keeping pace, adding servers, amassing file stores and updating PCs every few months.

Email, not surprisingly, has been at the heart of this digital big bang, with 97% of written business communication based on email, and some 84% of corporate IP being held in email systems. For IT Directors and managers of corporate email systems, then, the Information Age has resulted in a complex and costly IT infrastructure, accompanied by huge levels of risk, given the critical value of the information held in these systems.

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Dave is a busy email administrator, yet suddenly he seems to have a lot more time on his hands. Why? He no longer needs to worry about email archiving, email continuity and email security.

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ISO 27001 in a cloud world

Mimecast is preparing to go through our ISO 27001 certification at the moment and it struck me quite how different it is to certify as a cloud service vendor rather than as a traditional company.

Excuse my over simplification of the ISO 27001 process for those not involved in it, but effectively there are four stages:

1.      Define the organization’s acceptable risk

2.      Work out what risk the organization is exposed to

3.      Apply controls to reduce the residual risk to a level at or below the acceptable risk

4.      Rinse, repeat

A common method is to conduct a risk assessment, perhaps using the methodology covered in ISO 27001’s sister publication ISO 27005,  and then apply controls to manage the identified risks from another sister publication ISO 27002.

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Yesterday Mimecast hosted a dinner for the enterprise last night at Quaglino’s in London.  The event was attended by a good cross-section of verticals with representatives from investment banking, charities, telecommunications, legal and accountancy.

Within the private dining suite sat over 100 years of combined real-life experience of deploying IT projects to discuss the issues and opportunities related to Software-as-a-Service.  The different perspectives from the guests played well against each other and one thing bubbled to the surface very quickly: deploying cloud-based services may solve the technical issues but it does not solve the deeper issues related to how organisations utilise IT in their business.

The discussion then quickly moved to how discuss other projects that had faltered in the past not because the technology was flawed, but rather the business was trying to deploy technology without first understanding how they would, and could, use it.

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