Comments on: The firewall vs. the cloud

Slavish devotion to Web 2.0 concepts doesn't work in the real world, and companies that realize that can make more money.

[Goodbye Helicopter]

what an utter waste of time, twittering...

[Dave_IronKey]

At IronKey, we run an online service to remotely manage our secure USB flash drives and network authentication devices. Our customers are enterprises, banks, healthcare companies and government agencies. We found demand from some government agencies and some customers for a server version that they can host themselves, and we recently announced the server product.

I understand that some government agencies have policies against using SaaS services run by private companies. But for general enterprise use, a hosted service just makes so much sense.

We can provide updates to the service, do security scans, backup data, use hardware signing modules for storing encryption keys, etc. Doing all that to host it yourself just entails so much more work and IT expense. Also, an Internet hosted service is available around the world without the limitations of having to have a VPN connection back into the enterprise. I think that's a real world value for a SaaS model for remote workers.

[gggg sssss]

@ Dave_IronKey When DHS comes knocking, or the the lawyer from some ex trophy wife, or your good friends at teh IRS or DEA, you roll over like a cheap trick. Stay far far away from services like this

[paulactc]

Recently wrote a post about Yammer - while it will be great for collaboration, not so great for reducing email overload as they've claimed: http://poprl.com/K1a

We've found with our employee desktop messaging software (www.cutthroughcommunications.com) that many smaller companies (under 3000 seats) are happy to take a hosted version, even though they potentially send confidential internal info using it. Of course, any listed company that has Sarbanes Oxley to contend with always has a close look at information security, accessibility, and controls. We do offer and see larger companies take the software in house, so perhaps it's just the large guys you're talking about...