Archive for the 'Cloud Computing' Category

The Limits of “Free” Software

on 13 May 2010

I received an email newsletter today with the following pitch for a web-based donor database (perhaps you can guess which one): The Cloud offers you constituent relationship management (CRM) software that’s less expensive, easier to maintain, more accessible, more intuitive, and with greater flexibility and capacity than you’ve ever seen before. How much would you [...]

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Twitter Hacking and Cloud Security

on 23 Jul 2009

The front-page headlines read "Hacker steals Twitter’s confidential documents," but the real story isn’t about Twitter — it’s that the stolen documents were stored online, "in the cloud." This could happen to any nonprofit or company storing data this way. As we’ve seen over and over, it’s amazingly easy to guess or steal passwords. And [...]

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Pew Survey on Cloud Computing

on 17 Sep 2008

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has published a study of Americans’ use of "cloud computing," in which data and applications are stored online and are accessible via Web browsers. As more and more nonprofits move to using hosted customer-relationship management tools (CRMs) and venture into the world of social networking sites where data [...]

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Best Practices for Hosted Data

on 17 Sep 2008

The Pew survey on cloud computing reminded me of a discussion that Aspiration led in March, 2008. The topic was Best Practices for Hosted Data. The recommendations that emerged were: Know where all of your data lives (what Aspiration called "your data universe"). Keep this inventory up to date. Make sure you have access to [...]

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