An article in The Australian from Tuesday (heck, dontcha just love the global world we live in) talks about SaaS provider NetSuite rejecting Google Apps on the grounds of Google's terms of service regarding mining of data.

This shows one of the key issues that Cloud/SaaS is starting to open up - that of information security.

I think that it is fairly straightforward that companies don't want a service provider to use their business data in an identifiable way for commercial gain with a third party, in the Wal*Mart "Beer and Nappies" type model.

However, there are some cases that are more complicated:

Anonymous mining of patterns of usage for use internally within the service provider for product enhancement and development is probably a good thing.

Mining of data to provide contextual functionality to the individual (eg you've just read an email about a subject so that next time you search for something, results are influenced by that subject) is also probably desirable... but very close to showing of adverts relating to content (which might not be a good thing).

Mining of data to provide contextual functionality to the organisation (eg "people who looked at this document also looked at these") is also probably a good thing.

There are undoubtedly many more cases, but the issue appears to be the need for a mindset shift because the mining needs to be done by the service provider on their servers (as opposed to under the direct control of the consuming organisation).

I had a funny experience this morning that illustrated all of this. I had just picked up an email from a team member on my Android phone via Webmail saying that he was delayed on his flight back from Canada on their national airline. I switched to the phone's search tool to find out further details, typed "air" and it suggested "Air Canada" on auto complete.

The above could well have been coincidental, but imagine it wasn't as an example of contextual functionality provided by Google mining into my personal data. Is that a good thing? It certainly saved me a few moments of touch-screen typing.

A lot of our existing models for the control of data have been broken by the Internet. The reality is that with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube et al., there is little control over data within organisations, because if you try to control it, people will find free, open alternatives on the Web. It's going to take quite some time, though, for business practice (and legislation in some cases) to catch up with all of this...

Well, not too often that a blog post will be titled in homage to a song by Russ Abbot....

I spent last Thursday at Google Atmosphere, a day long, business-focused event looking at cloud computing held just down the road at the Bloomsbury Street Hotel.

Key speakers included journalist Nicholas Carr, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, SalesForce.com founder & CEO (and force of nature) Marc Benioff and writer Geoffrey Moore (as well as quite a few Google bigwigs).

Many thoughts coming out of the day, some related to technology, but probably more about the increasing move of IT into collaborative tools and the challenges that lie ahead in managing this in organisations.

The single piece that stuck most clearly in my mind, though, was a comment during a panel discussion about the different models for availability and security in a Cloud world. At the moment, plenty of companies have plenty of incidents of failure and security breach, but because they are small in volume, we rarely hear about them. Overall, cloud will undoubtedly improve the average downtime per user, but there will be occasional problems that occur for Cloud vendors that, because they hit a large number of people simultaneously, will create a great deal of press coverage.

This situation was likened to the difference in risk between automotive transport and air transport. In 2004, it was estimated that 1.2 million people died as a result of traffic accidents, whereas 771 people died as a result of plane crashes. However, as a panellist commented on the day, airlines have a tendency to "kill people in batches", so therefore every one of the 766 deaths would have generated relatively huge press coverage.

A few days whilst I moved DNS around to enable a Google Apps environment on my domain.

Learned more about A and MX records and CNAMES than I could ever wish for... but all now seems to be up and running again.

The new phone has got me thinking about how visions of the technology of the future go through a strange pattern of appearing to be wild and outlandish, and then suddenly somewhat quaint and of their own time.

I've never really been much of a science fiction fan (for those of you who are not aware, it's not a pre-requisite of a career in IT), but as a child was particularly inspired by the late Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The combination of Adams' incredibly funny writing, the sarcastic outlook on (then contemporary) life, and the performances of particularly Peter (actor, not Dragon or Department Store) Jones as The Book particularly inspired this 11 year old. Maybe I was also hooked because, whilst growing up in Watford, Adams' wrote about the meaning of life being discovered in a cafe in Rickmansworth.

Modern, touch screen, internet-connected smart phones, however have suddenly made The Book feel a bit dated. Whilst the Web is rarely as intentionally entertaining as the few dozen hhgttg articles penned by Adams, and Apple resolutely refuses to print Don't Panic on the cases of the iPhone, The Book now seems to be a bit of a dated vision of what the future would look like from the late 1970s.

That was no mean feat. Having just watched the BBC 4 Electric Dreams series, that era was a very different (untechnological) country. However, The Book is starting to feel akin to HG Wells' copper-pipe clad visions of space ships.

Having said all of that, and picking up a meme from Tim Lovejoy on Sunday morning TV, it's only six years until Marty McFly promised us hoverboards...

After over 12 years, for the first time I have bought myself a new personal mobile phone that wasn't built by Nokia.

The main driver for me to change was, in the end, the availability of Spotify Mobile, and that combined with my increasing use of services from Google has led me to an HTC Hero.

Initial experience has been good. I still prefer a proper keypad to a touch screen for typing, so am grateful for the BlackBerry that work provides to get stuff done on the Tube. However aside from Spotify (which, bar a couple of bugs, is just a dream), the big step forward is the seamless integration of data on and off the phone. My address book can link to Facebook profiles to keep photos and other details up to date, starting a draft email on the HTC can allow me to pick it up in a browser, and Google Docs seems to be fairly well integrated as well.

Spent my Tuesday this week as a client in my own company as a delegate at a Unified Communications event run by IDC and HP at the wonderful Gallery.

Lots of talk about video conferencing, which wasn't too much of a surprise as Tandberg were also sponsors. What it's made me realise is the extent to which real-time communications technologies (and all of the business social networking stuff as well) is about trying to change behviours and culture, and how the IT industry is uniquely placed to be rubbish at that.

The whole history of information systems is pretty much the history of Taylorist reinvention of white-collar work as process-driven automation. Where IT has "worked", it has mostly been as a result of taking nebulous (or non-existent) working practices and embedded rigorous, repeatable processes. And, of course, the dirty secret of the IT industry is that there are very, very few examples of these successes that have been clearly documented.

The other side of the coin is where IT has attempted to provide services that change the way people act and interact on the softer end of the spectrum. The telephone has been reasonably successful. Email a disaster. And video conferencing, despite being around for 40+ years, is still not working (and neither are video phones despite the fact that many of you will have a camera pointing at your ear every time you use your mobile phone).

Why the lack of success? Well, because behaviour and culture change is really hard. And even harder for an industry that is steeped in the logical histories of science, engineering and business process.

Interestingly, at questions on Tuesday's meeting a chap from the BBC asked about how to successfully change behaviours, and the hard response from the vendors was a uniform "Well, that's your problem. But it will help if you invest lots of money in out technology." How depressingly unsurprising...