Security+Privacy

Insight into the information security and privacy issues enterprises grapple with.

21 May 2008- 11:55 AM

Software-Plus-Service: Best or Worst of Both Worlds?

I’ve been thinking about the software-plus-service model, where a vendor offers online (hosted) software components that integrate with the vendor’s software installed onsite at the end-user organization (i.e., the customer). Microsoft is pushing this approach in response to on-demand offerings from Google and other providers. More recently, SAP AG has jumped […]

4 March 2008- 11:50 AM

Technology Trends: Room for Cautious Optimism

We recently published the results of our annual Cutter Benchmark Review survey on trends and technologies for the coming year. This is the third yearly issue of CBR where we ask our contributors to look forward to the coming year and see what technologies and IT trends we can expect to endure, which ones are […]

17 January 2008- 01:41 PM

Cyberflexing: What we’re in store for in 2008

In the last year or two, I’ve become very interested in cyberflexing. Because I’m a member of a National Academy of Sciences study (in progress) on the subject of “Ethical and Political Implications of Offensive Information Operations,” I must mention that what I’m saying here are personal opinions on many of the issues and not […]

20 July 2007- 12:37 PM

Sock Puppeting and Anonymous Posts

The short post that I put up deals principally with making social networking websites work: Attracting traffic, converting traffic to loyal, trusting repeat users, and then monetizing this trust in various ways. Rebecca Herold raises very interesting issues. As we learned from the cartoon in the New Yorker in July of 1993, “On […]

18 July 2007- 11:49 AM

Privacy and Security Considerations of Social Networking Sites

Eric Clemons’ post “Valuing Social Networking Websites” is interesting and very timely. Social engineering security and privacy issues are something I have been looking at a lot, and wrote an article addressing some of the issues a couple of months ago, “On The Internet, If It Looks, Quacks and Walks Like a Duck, Is […]

29 June 2007- 02:59 PM

Resonance, not Surveillance!

In April of this year Steve Barnett and I published two papers in the Cutter IT Journal on Resonance Marketing, the art and science of developing product offerings that resonate with customers’ wants and needs, cravings and longings. Resonance products represent such ideal fit with customers’ individual preferences that each becomes sort of a […]

18 June 2007- 10:45 AM

RIA security concerns when using Google Web Toolkit

Last week’s webinar “Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications” discussed the characteristics of various development approaches for building new-style, “live look-and-feel” web apps using Ajax, Flex or Google Web Toolkit (GWT). In particular we discussed how GWT alone among these alternatives provides a “single system image” to the developer, allowing him or her to […]

15 June 2007- 01:48 PM

Do You Have Leaky Data Pipes?

“Data leak” is one of the hot catch-phrases today. And it is no wonder.
Every day, almost literally, there are news stories published about companies losing personally identifiable information (PII) and other types of sensitive information. The data can leak out of a company in about as many ways as you can store or […]