September 06, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Wells Fargo leaks personal data
Wells Fargo has joined the unfortunate ranks of Chevron, AT&T, Williams-Sonoma, and the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs, in suffering a recent leak of private data.
In this case, the financial insitution lost personal information about an unspecified number of its employees, according to reports. The company informed workers of the breach on Aug. 28.
The data was on a disk drive and/or a laptop, both of which were swiped from the trunk of a car. Whether they know it or not, the perpatrators got away with names, Social Security numbers, and presciption information.
There's a common thread in all these data-leak cases, one that I've alluded to previously: The data was being handled by third-party companies. Frustratingly, most of these companies won't disclose the name of their data-fumbling partners, which means they don't have to suffer embarrassing publicity and make promises to step up their security measures. Heaven forbid.
Third-party follies aside, maybe organizations aren't taking the problem seriously because courts have already set a precedent that relieves them of negligence if they lose customer data. Last March, U.S. District Judge David Doty in Minnesota ruled that Wells Fargo was not responsible for losing customers' personal data because said data was never misused by miscreants. The judge's general reasoning was, the people suing the company hadn't suffered any actual damages; they were just worried about future damages.
So there you have it. Companies have the luxury of saving money by being lax on security. If they spill your SSN, your address, your phone number, your health records -- info that could be used for identity theft or a targetted phishing scam -- they don't have to fret. That is, unless the data is abused in the aforementioned manner, in which case I expect the victims would then have to demonstrate that the perpatrators were using the data they'd harvested from said company.
It's a fascinating legal precedent, isn't it? Why are there strict government regulations and guidelines in HIPAA that protect patients' medical records, for example, but nothing to better ensure protection of customer data, which could be used just as maliciously?
Granted, I'd rather that companies and organizations take it upon themselves to enact better security measures, such as implementing encryption technology. But for the time being, there's no tangible ROI in that, I guess. It's cheaper to just e-mail out an apology and give victimized customers and employees a year of free credit monitoring.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 6, 2006 10:13 AM
March 17, 2006 | Comments: (0)
Offshoring facts and figures presented
Offshoring presents salary advantages over hiring U.S. engineers, but America is not out of the game yet, according to a presentation at the SD West 2006 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Friday afternoon.
While an American engineer commands a salary of about $80,000, a counterpart in India earns $11,000. In Israel, an engineer earns $38,000 while one in Canada is paid $29,000. Chinese engineers are paid $9,000; in the Philippines, the salary is $7,000, said Vish Mishra, senior venture partner with Clearstone Venture Partners.
China and India, for their part, also produce far more engineers than the United States, he said. Each of those countries produces about 350,000 engineers per year as opposed to 65,000 engineers annually in America, said Mishra.
"What's being offshored? I think the answer is everything. Really," Mishra said. He cited jobs such as quality assurance, IT projects, legacy maintenance and module development.
Still, the United States holds an edge in talent, although the gap is narrowing, Mishra said. Architecture work is done in the United States as is some some design work, he said.
Mishra also said the time difference can present an advantage for offshoring, with overseas engineers able to do testing while Americans are still sleeping. But an audience member challenged this notion.
"In some cases, when you have a question, the earliest time you can get an answer is the next day," the audience member said.
Posted by Paul Krill on March 17, 2006 05:33 PM
July 29, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Dell pushes services for Microsoft Exchange
Dell this week announced a new professional services program to help companies upgrading to Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.
The new pre-configured server, storage and software packages and professional migration services are designed for businesses running Exchange Server 5.5 who want to migrate to Exchange Server 2003. Microsoft will end support for Exchange Server 5.5 at the end of the year.
"Dell is leveraging the combined power of three - Dell, EMC and Microsoft - fully integrated server, storage and software solutions to provide customers a single, reliable source of standards-based Exchange-migration options," said Linda York, vice president of global alliances marketing in Dell’s Product Group.
The offerings are part of Dell's services business which has been growing rapidly. In the first quarter revenue was up 30 percent over the previous year's totals.
For more, see our story here.
Posted by Bob Francis on July 29, 2005 08:44 AM
May 04, 2005 | Comments: (0)
A high seas approach to offshoring
A new type of offshoring may be emerging. It's literally offshore, just not by much. Three miles, in fact. In a boat, off the shores near Los Angeles.
The company that provides this model, SeaCode, calls it "a ship-based engineering facility." The way it works is that programmers spend 4-month shifts at sea, living on the boat, with room and board provided, in exchange for pay that is considerably higher than what they would earn working in a more traditional offshoring location, such as India.
But, for SeaCode customers, the company claims, the cost will still be less than what they would pay for programmers landlocked in the U.S.
And the company insists that its model will help the economy here in the States. From SeaCode's Web site:
With Hybrid-Sourcing SeaCode brings already offshored jobs back to the U.S. and assures that 90 cents of every dollar from our clients stays in the U.S. instead of flowing to foreign locations.
Another issue sure to sail into the hyrbid horizon is that the programmers-at-sea won't need H1B visas, an already controversial but increasingly contentious issue among the IT masses, that my colleague editor at large Eprhaim Schwartz has addressed in his columns, Green card regulations encourage offshoring and The H1B visa issue revisited, and will continue to track into the future.
Whether SeaCode sinks or swims, the new company has spurred some headlines, my personal favorite being Forbes' C++ faring lads. Hiawatha Bray of The Boston Globe also wrote about SeaCode.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on May 4, 2005 07:13 AM
April 19, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Outsourcing not all it's cracked up to be
Just when the zealots would have us believe that outsourcing was on the verge of steamrolling IT departments and leaving far fewer employees in its wake, Deloitte and Touche issued the results of a study that indicates myriad twists in just such a plot.
Deloitte's report, Calling a Change in the Outsourcing Market, found:
-- 70 percent of participants have had negative experiences with outsourcing.
-- One in four respondents realized that they could handle certain functions better in-house, and yanked those back inside the corporate walls.
-- 44 percent did not see cost-savings from outsourcing.
-- 57 percent ended up absorbing costs that they believed were included in the contracts with vendors.
-- Nearly 50 percent cited hidden costs as the biggest problem.
The list goes on and on. Literally. More than 80 percent of respondents have either limited or no transparency to a vendor's pricing schema, 73 percent are working to reduce outsourcing vendor dependancy, and nearly 50 percent lack a corporate-wide methodology to evaluate the business case for outsourcing.
Deloitte is not the only consultancy to take this stance. Gartner last month issued multiple studies on outsourcing that said customer service outsourcing is destined to fail, demand will increase for business process outsourcing, and that outsourcing could cost as much as one-third more than controlling the task in-house.
All that is not to say that there are no benefits to outsourcing at all -- of course there are, and some invaluable ones at that. In A field guide to software as a service, we look at some of the positives while posing the question: Could a business run entirely on hosted offerings?
I suspect you already know the answer; we did. But the writers uncovered some surpirses along the way.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on April 19, 2005 09:01 AM
January 27, 2005 | Comments: (0)
Technological Trickle-Down Among Indian Outsourcers
Technology Review this morning has a story about one of the side-effects outsourcing could have in India: creating a potentially fertile ground for IT startups.
From the TR article:
The impact of outsourcing on indigenous innovation may not be so clear cut. Big outsourcing providers like Infosys may not be fountains of innovation, but their presence will have—in fact, is already having—trickle-down effects. Outsourcing, many Indians argue, is training India’s next generation of tech entrepreneurs.
The piece says that large, successful outsourcing operations are not only arming employees with skills they can use to start new companies, but also paying them well, so that they'll be able to afford it. Adding to that, some Indian's trained here in The States are returning home to spin the startup wheel.
Posted by Tom Sullivan on January 27, 2005 08:22 AM
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