There is no such thing as a corporate firewall so you might as well store data online. On SaaS and Data Governance

Woodrow points to Ray Lane talking about software as a service.

"I think there’s a big concern over data outside the [corporate] firewall. Some companies, even companies like a General Motors (GM), are comfortable with placing their data in the hands of a service provider if they can keep control of it, so they can manage security. But it’s going to take a long time for most companies to get comfortable with that — another five years."

Get comfortable, eh. What is wrong with this picture?

Sure corporations may have "corporate firewalls", but they don’t actually prevent datTags: Google, Vedior, loosely coupled, SaaS, Don Dodge, HP, Wells Fargoa leakage do they?

It seems skewed to me that in many cases the same corporations that have lost the personal details of hundreds of thousands of customers would be concerned about storing customer and corporate data online, with a third party such as salesforce.com or Mr Ted. Maybe the online service provider will do a better job. They couldn’t do worse than some of the members of the role of customer data shame, could they?

US veterans, Wells Fargo, HP, Royal Ahold, are four recent breaches, but the list is endless, and public breaches are only the tip of the iceberg. If enterprises are incapable of managing their own data, why not outsource to an online provider?

Why would you outsource your customer operations to an Indian call center and then worry about using an online service provider?

Am I about to host all my data on Google? no. But then Google isn’t offering policy or service guarantees. Others are.

Could it be that Vedior is the future and Paul Murphy got it wrong with his commandment not to outsource critical functions?

All I know is, the new world is networked, and its really hard to build networkedness into applications and processes after the fact. So why not consider a specialist, a software as a service offering?