Strategies for SaaS, Cloud Computing, Open Source and Governance

As Open Source software continues to penetrate every facet of software business (vendor and consumer) companies now face a challenge in getting a handle on the various open source software that they might be using. In the course of the last three years of my working with many startups or their leaders, I have [...]

Compliance audits have become a part of life for most companies these days. Companies have relied on certifications to establish and declare the conformance of the related business processes and internal controls to the various regulatory mandates like Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI-DSS, HIPAA. But incidents of data breach that have occurred, time and again prove that just [...]

Going with SaaS comes with a set of concerns around Data Security. Intrusion Detection, Prevention and Penetration Testing should allay those fears to a large extent.

If you are customer having a business application like Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft or SAP in production I am sure you have constantly run into this need to clone/replicate Production database.
Why would someone need a copy of production instance?
Some of the most common reasons are

to create a test environment with representative production data
to create a [...]

Iny my series of governance topics today I will go into the the key benefits of effective Change Management and key areas of  the Audit process.
Audit is becoming the norm in most companies. Thanx to all the myriad regulatory requirements, SOX, HIPAA, PCI DS, Gramm-Leach-Biley Act (GLBA), California State, Japan SOX, IT Organizations across the [...]