I suspect that many of you are familiar with the term "hard coding a value" whereby the age of an individual or their location is written into the condition (or action) of a business rule (in this case) as shown below:

if customer.age > 21 and customer.city == 'denver'

then ...

Such coding practices are perfectly expectable provided that the conditional values, age and city, never change. They become entirely unacceptable if a need for different values could be anticipated. A classic example of where this practice occurred that caused considerable heartache in the IT industry was the Y2K issue where dates were updated using only the last 2 digits of a four digit number because the first 2 digits were hard-coded to 19 i.e. 1998, 1999. All was well provided that the date did not advance to a time beyond the 1900’s since no one could be certain of what would happen when the millennia arrived (2000). A considerably amount of work (albeit boring) and money, approximately $200 billion, went into revising systems by way of software rewrites and computer chip replacements in order to thwart any detrimental outcomes. It is obvious how a simple change or an assumption can have sweeping consequences.

You may wonder what Y2K has to do with Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS). Well, what if we considered rules themselves to be hard-coded. If we were to write 100s of rules in Java, .NET or whatever language that only worked for a given scenario or assumption, would that not constitute hard-coded logic? By hard-coded, we obviously mean compiled. For example, if a credit card company has a variety of bonus campaigns, each with their own unique list of rules that may change within a week’s time, what would be the most effective way of writing software to deal with these responsibilities?

The iconic software company that is based in King County Washington has been getting almost universally slammed from it's recent Los Angeles press announcement about its entry into the hardware business with the convertible laptop/tablet known as Surface.

Certainly I can see the point that it is now competing with its hardware vendors/partners. Intel has done a good job in the arena creating 'reference designs' without competing with its partners.

There is another viewpoint which seems to be ignored. The cold facts are Microsoft is a public company. This puts Microsoft in a legal position of doing the most it can to return value to its shareholders. Failure to do so means somebody is going to jail.

Microsoft has a vision, which at the end of the day is, a certain way to get enough people to see enough value to hand over their money, to fulfill their fiduciary duty.

Computers. They’re a part of our everyday lives. Most of us couldn’t imagine living a day without them. We use them for school, work, and fun and use them to stay connected to those we love and care about. Since the invention of the web cam, millions of us use webcams to communicate with loved-ones and business contacts far away.

Web camera use has leveled the playing field for business entrepreneurs and given teenagers a fun way to chat with friends. However, solid citizens aren’t the only ones who make use of this popular modern technology. Recently, there have been reports of criminals using a type of webcam spy hack to insert themselves unseen into the living rooms and bedrooms of millions of unsuspecting users.

The Webcam Spy Hack

The most popular way criminals gain access to your webcam is through innocent-looking emails. You may receive an e-card from someone in your contacts list. When you click on it, you’re directed to another website to view the e-card. While you’re listening to music and watching animated puppies scroll across the screen, a Trojan horse is silently installed into your computer’s hard drive.

As the cloud buzz is getting louder with every passing day you are tempted to take the big leap into the cloud but may have restrained yourself paranoid by ad infinitum cloud security discussions floating on the web. No one can deny the fact that your data is the lifeblood your business. So, undoubtedly its security is of paramount importance for survival of your business.  As cloud computing is a paradigm shift from the traditional ways of using computing resources, you must understand its practical security aspects.

Is Cloud Computing Safe?

There can’t be a binary answer (Yes or No) to this question. But with my experience and as an authority on the subject I can tell you that technologies enabling Cloud services are not in any way less secure than the traditional or on-premise hosting model.  Also, with the evolution of technology, the cloud providers are getting matured and almost all the providers are offering built-in security, privacy, data backups and risk management as a part of their core service.If you are not a big IT company then you must ask yourself:

·         Can an on-premise solution or a traditional hosting provider match the same level of standard security and privacy requirement as provided by the specialist cloud provider whose core competency lies in providing state of the art security and privacy?