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Insight
Abstract
Although still a somewhat ambiguous term, "cloud computing" represents a watershed in both the evolution of outsourced service provision and in data center infrastructure. Public clouds provide outsourced services in a manner that incorporates efficiency, flexibility, scalability, and improvements in charging under a pay-as-you-go utility model.
Cloud computing has become the accepted name for the next evolutionary step of the data center and the services enabled by that infrastructure. It encompasses a range of service capabilities that can be provided to the enterprise and to individuals through a utility computing model by using multiple processors that are managed together as one, with access to services, provisioning, and management through the Internet.
So how can companies work effectively to ensure information security, privacy, and compliance areas collaborate to make initiatives most successful? The authors in this issue attempt to answer that question, addressing a wide range of information security and privacy convergence issues in the process. In fact, we had more than 20 folks who offered to write articles on this topic! Because of the overwhelming response, we are going to dedicate two issues -- this one and another later in the year -- to information security and privacy convergence.
There has been much talk recently regarding a convergence of information security and privacy. Not that this is anything particularly new - convergence has been happening ever since privacy became a concern. After all, privacy requires the implementation of robust information security controls and appropriate safeguards. There are at least 46 privacy breach notice laws in the US alone; understanding and complying with their multiple requirements (to say nothing of the growing number of other national and international privacy laws) will require privacy and information security areas to work together for effective enterprise-wide management.
In a recent BI Executive Update (see "Open Source BI and Data Warehousing: New Directions," Vol. 9, No. 2), I discussed the possible impact on the BI market caused by end-user organizations adopting open source BI tools.
The biggest trend to hit business intelligence (BI) since the days of executive information systems may not be an innovation in the technology itself but in the kinds of data the technology analyzes. The new BI foreshadows a time when, for example, a disease epidemic will be stopped because data can reveal to health officials the movements of infected people. Welcome to the world of "reality mining."