Industry Insight

I recently released the first, second and third installments of a six-part blog series about what it takes to have an enterprise-ready cloud service, and the three characteristics that differentiate an enterprise-grade cloud service from a typical consumer service: security, reliability and trust. As a quick refresher, there are five categories to…

I recently released the first and second installments of a six-part blog series about what it takes to have an enterprise-ready cloud service. While the identity hack of Wired’s Mat Honan (and the media fallout that followed) spurred the idea, the focus is on the three characteristics that differentiate an enterprise-grade cloud service from a…

You’ve probably heard by now, but enterprise is the hot thing in the Valley right now. (For the record, I’ve always thought what we are doing is cool.) Still, the widespread interest was only re-affirmed yesterday during the “How Enterprise Got Sexy” panel at TechCrunch Disrupt. The panel gave me the chance to discuss mobile disruption, the…

Last Tuesday I released part 1 of a series of blog posts that discuss what it takes to have an enterprise-ready cloud service. (As a quick refresher, the idea of defining the enterprise cloud was spurred after the media fall-out from the identity hack of Wired’s Mat Honan.) In the post, I identified the three broad characteristics that…

The barrage of articles and blogs that cropped up following the personal identity hack on Wired’s Mat Honan got me thinking about the importance of security in the cloud. In my experience, what happened to Mat is not a unique issue. In fact, it’s actually a somewhat typical downside to – what I call – consumer cloud services. It was, no doubt, a…

At Okta, we’ve gone through many iterations of using Jenkins to build and test our software. We use a number of tools to make sure our code works properly, and we like to have Jenkins manage these. The list would be familiar to anyone using the Java environment; PMD, Cobertura, unit and functional tests with JUnit, Selenium tests with testNG, and…

The RSA Conference, the largest IT security show of the year, ended two weeks ago, but the conversations that took place are still reverberating. Chris Preimesberger, editor at eWeek, has identified a few of the major themes that are likely to impact IT departments in 2012: Web application firewalls. With the number of cyber data hacks rising,…

I’ve had a number of conversations with customers and prospects about cloud security recently and have been struck by how divergent people’s views are. Invariably, they fall into one of two camps. One camp, the “server huggers,” thinks the cloud is totally insecure because it is out of their control. These are usually IT people who have spent the…

Richard Waters and Chris Nattal over at The Financial Times just wrote a nice article entitled Cloud threatens to end PC’s reign looking at the impact cloud services adoption is having on the PC. They do a great job pointing out that in this “post-PC” era, sales of PCs are still at 400m units annually and growing, but at the same time we are…

Signing up partners is easy. Building effective partnerships is another story. I have spent the last 20 years working on different software partnering structures. Between HP, BroadVision, Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors, I have learned a lot about what it takes to create a great partnership. I am now working on a new startup with some old…