There has been a lot of coverage of the compromised Twitter corporate docs that were released on TechCrunch recently. Unfortunately many have taken this as an opportunity to say “the cloud is a security risk.” This is patently untrue. As has been extensively reported, Twitter’s docs were accessed from Google Apps by a compromised user name and a weak password. Most applications are vulnerable if the user name is exposed and the password is “password” or “qwerty.” How many times have we read about laptops gone missing? A few years ago I was alerted to mass security breaches at the Veterans Administration and the University of Texas within weeks. They both had various levels of my personal information. These breaches had nothing to do with Cloud computing. In the VA’s case, it was a stolen laptop.
I think it is fair to say that both on demand and on premise solutions face security threats. Every vendor and client must assess the processes and protocols in place and strive to minimize unauthorized access. The Cloud is undoubtedly a good thing for software. There are countless advantages brought to both vendors and clients through Cloud computing. It is a logical technological step forward and one that is not going away. The real story is how we continue to improve security measures with creativity and innovation. Creating a mythical boogey man around Cloud computing because it might pose a threat to your current business model is wasted energy.
Over the weekend Mumboe was upgraded with several new features including folder level tracking and the ability to select multiple agreements in the list/folder view and perform an action.
In April , we introduced the concept of Agreement Tracking for users to automatically receive milestone notifications and agreement updates on their Mumboe Dashboard. Phase one of this feature only allowed you to track individual agreements. Phase two has now been released and allows users to select an entire folder for tracking. Agreements added to a tracked folder are automatically tracked. You can access this view by clicking Agreements on the main navigation bar (you may need to toggle to Folder View).
Track an entire Folder
You will also notice on the Agreement view (Folder or List view) we have added a checkbox column to the agreement records. Using these checkboxes you can now select one or more agreement records and perform an action. Our current actions include: moving to new folders, deleting, tracking and untracking. We may expand that list in the future, but this addresses the requests that we received from multiple users. Please keep the input coming!
Select Multiple Agreements to Move, Track or Delete
To see the full list of features and fixes included in this upgrade click Support in the upper-right corner of the Mumboe application and visit our Customer Forum.
I recently read an article on internetnews.com titled Gartner: Many Users Dissatisfied With SaaS. It describes the results of Gartner report based on survey results about SaaS products. From the title you can tell the picture is somewhat negative, but let’s look at some of the quoted findings:
“Of those who had looked at SaaS products but chose not to deploy them, 42 percent said cost had been the barrier…” Does this mean they chose competing, on-premise software that had a lower cost instead? Or does it mean something more like we chose not to implement a solution due to budgetary reasons?
The above quote went on to say, “…while 38 percent cited integration issues.” Since when did integration issues become tied to SaaS only? Isn’t this a major factor in many enterprise software solution decisions?
“Thirty-three percent said the SaaS solution they looked at failed to meet technical requirements.” Again, isn’t this a problem that could pop-up when evaluating any software solution? Do all non-SaaS products meet technical requirements?
Don’t get me wrong…I get that SaaS is not a silver bullet. And we agree that decision makers need to evaluate their options when looking for solutions. I’m just thinking that most of the issues discussed in this article apply to most software solutions.
Top 10 Excuses For Not Considering Document Management This Year is a great article by AIIM. While Mumboe doesn’t fall into the document management category we do reside in that same space of information management and run into very similar situations with our prospects.
Our most heard excuse is #1 on the list and is “If we need to, we can usually find it …” Often times the main reason a prospect has started looking for a product like Mumboe is because they want to find a centralized repository where they can store all of their agreements and allow controlled access to their co-workers in an effort to save time. However, that reason is not always translated well to those in management that do not deal with the day-to-day requests/fire-drills looking for the executed version of an agreement.
My personal favorite is # 9 about change being expensive. Too often we see a small team or department trying to implement a solution to relieve some daily headaches and make a process more efficient. Then IT and/or management get involved and decide that the best course of action is to implement a fully integrated solution across an enterprise. That sounds great, but what typically ends up happening is the organization falls into a case of analysis paralysis due to the daunting task/cost associated with planning/changing businesses processes that will work with the new ‘solution’. In the end the project runs significantly over budget or sometimes is never completed. Meanwhile, the department that was trying to solve one major problem is still stuck without a solution.
Of course the above example is not always the case, but I’m sure you can tell us about a similar story in your organization.
