Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mandy Edwards, CIO Of Sitel (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: OK. Would you talk more about integration? I would love to know more about what is happening in the area of knowledge base. Where is the knowledge base? Do customers maintain it, or does Sitel? What is the process that goes on in augmenting the knowledge base, based on what your agents are learning? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mandy Edwards, CIO Of Sitel (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: This is a great example that you are moving e-mail to the cloud. What is the strategy from a vendor point of view? I have been doing a lot of these interviews, talking to a lot of CIOs, and one category that is coming up is email and productivity applications and the office suite. This entire suite, bread-and-butter applications are moving to the cloud. People are moving out of legacy systems such as Lotus Notes and so forth. So, what is your legacy system and what is it that you’re moving into? >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Mandy Edwards, CIO Of Sitel (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

In this interview, we spoke with Mandy Edwards, the global chief information officer at Sitel. Sitel is the leading business process outsourcing (BPO) call center provider, as ranked by the Black Book of Outsourcing, a Data Monitor company. Sitel’s customer interaction outsourcing solutions span more than 135 domestic, nearshore, and offshore call centers in 26 countries across North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia Pacific. The company has more than 52,000 employees. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Chris Burchett, CIO Of Credant Technologies (Part 7)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: If you look more closely that problem [of proving you are who you say you are], yes, I think that is a problem that is unsolved and open. But it is also a very big problem, and architecturally how do you see that evolving? Because, on the one hand we have major players who are trying to be the identity that people use to log into various [services]. They have become the single sign-on for identity solutions for the various services out there, Facebook being one of them. So, when you say it is an open problem, what parts of the problem domain are you trying because, it is not a good idea for a startup to go in and say, I am going to become the single sign-on for the entire cloud. That is not a reasonable position to take. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Chris Burchett, CIO Of Credant Technologies (Part 6)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: I think in general, the security holes around the world are much larger right now because, for one reason, there is a lot more distributed, federated technology being used, and as a result there are a lot more holes. And you just gave us the use case of Dropbox, which should be encrypted but is not, and most of our laptops are not encrypted! >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Chris Burchett, CIO Of Credant Technologies (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Siddharth Garg

Sramana Mitra: How can the [data owner have the obligation]? I mean, unless Salesforce.com is involved in the process of securing the data, a customer of Salesforce.com cannot possibly secure that data without Salesforce.com’s being involved in the process. It is just not architecturally viable. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Chris Burchett, CIO Of Credant Technologies (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and Siddarth Garg

Sramana Mitra: I get your point from an adaption point of view, but today we are at a somewhat more mature stage of adoption in the cloud world, right? We are a good five to six years into serious cloud deployments, so we have a lot of very large deployments where IT does get involved and they do scrutinize the security issues; there is a lot of integration happening. There are a lot of analytics happening in CRM systems, for instance, maybe a hybrid configuration of private and public cloud and all sorts of things. So, IT is involved and the CIO is paying attention, the CIO’s office is paying attention, and security is an issue. >>>

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Chris Burchett, CIO Of Credant Technologies (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and Siddarth Garg

Sramana Mitra: So, you already have a solution, and you are just applying it to a cloud environment because you encountered a problem that your customers were asking for solutions for.

Chris Burchett: That is right, and there are additional functionalities that we are building into the product in the future that will be unique to the cloud. For example, if you are running in a public cloud, is it possible that somebody else launches your virtual machine image without your knowledge? Yes, it’s possible. Now, if you control the account for the log into that image, this greatly mitigates your risk. But you can further mitigate your risk by ensuring that the encryption keys cannot open unless you are aware of it. So, one of the things we will be providing is the ability for the agent that enforces encryption in that machine to “phone home,” if you will, and request that it be able to unlock the key. >>>