Compliance and Mergers and Clouds, Oh My!
"Cloud" computing has been the mainstay of the likes of Amazon, Google and Yahoo. The "old-timers" like IBM, HP and Microsoft are jumping on-board offering SaaS and a variety of hosted services to replace traditional in-house systems like e-mail, CRM and web-content management, to name a few.
Our very existence is becoming entrenched in the cloud; lives are chronicled on blogs which for the most part reside on remote servers. Our images are uploaded to sites like Flickr. The under-the-coffee-table photo album is quickly becoming obsolete.
Even the radio airways are moving toward becoming one single mass. The recent merge of XM and Sirius has initiated even more debate than the one over who is funnier -- Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony? Blogger Roger Ehrenberg called the merger a potential, "Ad-driven Google in the sky:"
The continuing migration of data off of individual's hard drives and onto remote networks administered by a narrowing group of companies leads to many questions of privacy and responsibility. Lori MacVittie, at F5.DevCenteral.com, points out the problems businesses may face with compliance regulations:
Undoubtedly, with the surge of data aggregation, many concerns regarding privacy, compliance regulations and advertising tactics will continue to increase as well.