Cloud sovereignty
Cloud sovereignty remains big news this month. In his article for CIO, Bank of England CIO: “cloud opens UK data to CIA spies”, Matthew Finnegan details the speech given by Bank of England CIO John Finch at the Cloud World Forum advising British businesses to be wary of partnering with US-based cloud suppliers. Finch said businesses risk their data being accessed by US government agencies like the CIA and FBI under the USA PATRIOT Act. He urged businesses to gain a full understanding of the regulations of not only the country where the data is stored, but also where the hosting company is domiciled (which is often different, especially in the case of cloud vendors who offer multiple data centres). HighQ’s CEO Ajay Patel wrote more about this subject in his blog post, Bank of England CIO warns UK businesses against US cloud hosting.
Ben Weinberger reiterates this in his commentary for Legal Technology, Conflict of Laws and Absurdity of Data Protection in the 21st Century, where he states “At the very least, I’d suggest it means that, a firm that is truly ‘worried’ about their data not leaving the E.U. (and many seem to be) perhaps will think twice about where that data is and where it may end-up. Taken to the extreme,” he goes on, “I think firms outside the U.S. (especially those within the E.U.) who are worried about their data being accessed by the U.S. will probably want to avoid using ISPs or hosting providers (software as a service providers or otherwise) with ANY presence within the U.S”
Back at the Cloud World Forum, Finch went on to describe the Bank of England’s cloud infrastructure, explaining that they use their own internal private cloud-type model, and although the Bank has no plans to move to the public cloud, he can see the potential for public cloud. “I think cloud can deliver really great value for many use cases where this kind of capability can be a great enabler,” he said.
Drew Turney tackles the private vs public cloud conundrum in his article for ZDNet. His article calls on numerous cloud industry professionals to add their points of view on the debate, including Ajay Patel. The article considers the benefits and drawbacks of both public and private cloud hosting, in areas such as privacy, security, cost, scalability and transition. Turney concludes that the best approach for most businesses is to mix and match. He explains that for businesses that have a relatively consistent workload and the means to deploy it, a private cloud will suffice. If the workload fluctuates wildly, public will be better than investing in data processing that sits idle during low periods.
Open business
In his article for the Guardian, Open (for) business: how transparency can equal sustainability – and survival, David Cushman explains that with the emergence of concepts such as open business, there is a growing opportunity to create value that “extends beyond back-slaps in the boardroom”. In his article, Cushman says that building upon several key principles, most notably transparency, shareability, connectedness and trust, open businesses attempt to dramatically reconsider – and clarify – the way companies work with both customers and employees. Together, Cushman explains, these elements of open business equal enterprise collaboration, which he explains is key building a successful business.
In an article on his blog, The Last Thing We Need is an Enterprise Social Network, Simon Terry writes an open letter to an anonymous CEO explaining that simply implementing an enterprise social network will not lead to improvements in the way the business runs or how colleagues communicate with one another. Terry implores the CEO to implement strategy around becoming a connected business. This is an issue we’ve covered many times on the HighQ blog, particularly in our series of blog posts: the enterprise social networking best practice guide.
Marketing automation
In his article for CMSWire, The Evolution of Marketing Automation, Steve Reigel speaks of the progression from one-sized fits all digital communication to the personalized experiences we have today, but explains how far we still have to go to reach the promise of true marketing automation — the optimization of customer management. He quotes Gartner Research, who predicted that by 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationships without talking to a human. Reigel argues that in order for this to happen effectively, marketing automation must evolve from its current state to address the following three themes: Deeper Marketing Stack Integration; Marketer Empowerment; Customer Management Optimization.
HighQ’s Ben Wightwick talks about importance of integrated marketing in his blog post Adding value in legal marketing with integrated content marketing, where he explains that law firms create a lot of content which is often under-utilised. Integrated marketing automation can aid in distributing content to multiple channels at once, maximising the value gained from the content and reduce the amount of resource required to publish it. Wightwick explains that when it comes to integrated content marketing campaigns, once they are set up with the correct tools they do not require much additional resource beyond the creation of the content.
Cover image CC Taro Taylor
