SEC talks social media and cloud computing security gets clarity

A couple of thought-provoking posts on timely topics

People have been asking me to post something original today, but after two days away from the office I’m still digging out.

Luckily, in the process of doing so I came across these two pieces.

They are from people I know or have worked with in the past and are on topics or issues I have had to cover in the past but am not current on, so why reinvent the wheel?

The first is by Caitlin Zucal (the marketing coordinator for RegEd, which now owns Arkovi, a social media archiving system): New SEC Ruling Officially Opens the Door to Social Media for Financial Advisors

I like the spin she puts on things in the first few paragraphs and the links to the original SEC postings. True, there are overt marketing pitches and links in here, and you can find similar posts at the blogs of competitors Actiance, Erado, Hearsay, Live Office, Smarsh, Socialware and Sungard (among probably others that I’m not yet familiar with).

And just so no one feels left out, here are all the websites for the social media control/compliance/archiving vendors for advisory firms/broker-dealers I’ve regularly covered these last few years. Several cover e-mail archiving too (or started in that space and added social media later). Keep in mind that they are not all equally comprehensive in their offerings or necessarily similar in the way they work. Read the related coverage at the end for more on that. I list them here because they all have an interest in following what the SEC and Finra are up to and do a good job of interpreting and passing along that information (it is good marketing fodder, after all).

Erado
Hearsay Social Inc.
Live Office
Protegent Social Media Surveillance, from SunGard
RegEd
Smarsh
Socialware

Peter Coffee on cloud computing security

The next interesting post is this one from Slashdot, which is really more often about tech for techies, but this post does a good job laying out a cogent argument for cloud computing based on how secure it can be.

This topic has come up a lot during some panel discussions some fellow technology ‘experts’ and I participated on at industry conferences the last few months. Mr. Coffee, who now works for Salesforce, was a mentor of mine for years when we both worked for technology publisher Ziff Davis Media.
As he writes: “There are two major problems with the oft-asked question, ‘Is it possible to actually secure your data once it’s in the cloud?’ Those problems are the words ‘secure’ and ‘cloud’ — both of which are subject to widely varying notions of what they mean.”

There are so many different flavors of cloud (software as a service, infrastructure as a service, et al.) and so many different levels of security it is difficult to make blanket statements.
In his post, he elevates the discussion beyond what one gets from a marketing department, and is a bit more inclusive of the underpinnings. He takes more of an approach of the engineer trying to explain the subject to a sophisticated but more novice audience.

Anyway, it is worth a read for the different perspective: “Can Data in the Cloud Actually Be Secure?” by Peter Coffee.