A Day of (digital) Freedom...

As the nation celebrates its successful fight for liberty on this fourth of July, it's fascinating to note how many liberties we've willfully given up these last ten years and how that impacts security for both cloud storage and data transmission.  One of the major factors individuals and companies cite as their reason for refusing cloud based technologies is security; they stress the need to ensure privacy and corporate governance that can be better achieved if the information is on premise.

http://edgestrategies.com/component/k2/item/117-just-released-2012-microsoft-edge-technologies-smb-cloud-adoption-study.html

While this logic may seem sound and provide a sense of comfort, this is simply not the case.  As more information comes to light about the NSA activities and Google's own admissions about data mining, the idea that shared information is safe just because it's behind your firewall is an illusion.  In fact, leading edge cloud storage providers can actually offer greater protection of your data than private enterprises for a fraction of the cost, monitored around the clock and with better ease of use to both the client and their customers. For example, an exploit from the inside the corporate environment makes the firewall moot.  Having an outsourced partner that is more focused in the area of security, and that is also less susceptible to internal exploits (i.e. via employees, infected end-users, etc.) is actually safer than the notion of doing it “in-house”.  Just because one has physical “control”, doesn’t mean the infrastructure is safer.  

Creating truly secure environments, you see, is the ultimate dilemma - by making something more secure, you're simultaneously making that piece of information more difficult to access for the others that need it.  The ability to quickly service and respond to a client usually trumps the need for privacy.  We see that more and more as people start to employ popular applications like Dropbox and Evernote.  In this high security world we worry too much about guarding information from imagined threats and not enough about sharing it properly, securely and effectively.  Cywest Communications understands this and we're developing solutions that address the customer's need for security and ease of use specifically.  As Thomas Jefferson said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it."

The Truth...

“His priority did not seem to be to teach them what he knew, but rather to impress upon them that nothing, not even knowledge, was foolproof.”

-J.K. Rowling – “Harry Potter & The Order Of The Phoenix"

It doesn’t take a boy wizard, or the rules of magic, to understand modern telecommunications although, sometimes, it sure feels like it might.  For an industry that’s generally resistant to change it’s amazing to see the evolution of telco and how it literally now shapes the day to day operations of businesses across the globe.  Companies want to enhance their telco infrastructures, and migrate to cloud based services, but most don’t know how.  What are the best practices and how can those steps be properly quantified?  Decision makers should look directly to the telco carriers for these answers.  Unfortunately, research surveys consistently show that business and non-business decision makers don’t trust the telco carriers to give them honest answers or the best prices.  That same group doesn’t view the carriers as thought leaders in their own industry either!  There’s a knowledge gap and it grows wider every day.

I started Cywest Communications to fill that gap and I’ve been doing it successfully for our clients for more than twenty years.  What I’m going to do here on this blog is share some of that experience with a broader audience.  Hopefully, I help you become better educated in this area, and lift up the curtain on some of the industry secrets that are often used to make customers enter deals that are against their best interest.

So, why should you listen to me – an older guy with a wife, three kids and a dog that has difficulty going to the bathroom?  Hopefully it’s because you’ll find these posts to be both informative and mildly entertaining, but also because I’m going to tell you the honest truth even when it's against my own self interest, just like I did about my dog.  There’s a lot of power in the word “truth” and it’s in rare supply given today’s fast paced world of bite-size information delivery. 

Truth has a way of coming to the surface despite efforts of repression or marketing.  The truth about telco, about cloud computing, connectivity and security are subjects I’m truly passionate about and look forward to sharing with you.  Talk to you soon.