Iron Mountain going back to roots in storage services

Posted on Apr 27, 2011 in Records Management News

Iron Moun­tain going back to roots in stor­age ser­vices
Com­pany changes direc­tion, con­sid­ers sell­ing off dig­i­tal busi­ness
By Lucas Mear­ian
April 27, 2011 06:00 AM ET

Com­put­er­world — A week after Iron Moun­tain announced it had replaced its CEO, the com­pany said it’s con­sid­er­ing sell­ing its archiv­ing, e-discovery and online backup and recov­ery busi­ness to return to its roots in doc­u­ment and tape stor­age services.

“There’s no guar­an­tee a deal will get done because we’re still early in the process, but we have good inter­est. And as you can imag­ine these processes take a mat­ter of a few months, before we know it will unwind itself,” said Richard Reese, who abruptly took over as CEO on April 14.

Why hackers and spooks want our heads in the cloud

Posted on Apr 26, 2011 in Records Management News

by John Har­ris, Guardian, guardian.co.uk, Mon­day 25 April 2011 20.00 BST

Our unthink­ing embrace of these giant data cen­tres is throt­tling the giddy anti-authoritarian com­put­ing dream

Imag­ine this. A noto­ri­ous multi­na­tional is on the look­out for new busi­ness. For the sake of argu­ment, let’s imag­ine it’s Lock­heed Mar­tin, the defence, secu­rity, and “advanced tech­nol­ogy” cor­po­ra­tion that has lately been see­ing to the cen­sus. From some­where in their R&D divi­sion comes an idea: “per­sonal lifestyle secu­rity ser­vices” for mil­lions across the planet. The wheeze is sim­ple enough: sign up and hand them your per­sonal cor­re­spon­dence, finan­cial records, bank details, ID doc­u­ments, and more. They’ll have all your stuff, and you’ll have a unique pass­word when­ever you want a look. And just think: more clut­ter shunted out of your life, leav­ing you to glide through the min­i­mal­ist bliss of 21st cen­tury living.

Defogging the Cloud: Applying Fourth Amendment Principles to Evolving Privacy Expectations in Cloud Computing

Posted on Apr 22, 2011 in Records Management News

by David A. Couil­lard
93 Minn. L. Rev. 2205 (2009)

It took nearly a cen­tury after the inven­tion of the tele­phone for the Supreme Court to rec­og­nize that the Fourth Amend­ment could be applied to the con­tent of pri­vate tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions. Today, the Inter­net is in a sim­i­lar state of limbo, with courts reluc­tant to grant Fourth Amend­ment pro­tec­tion to data placed in a medium that has been per­ceived as inher­ently pub­lic in nature. This per­cep­tion has begun to shift as Inter­net tech­nol­ogy becomes faster, more wide­spread, and more mobile. “Cloud com­put­ing” is the trendy phrase used to describe this change. Rather than merely a medium of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the ethe­real Inter­net “cloud” is now used as a vir­tual plat­form for stor­ing and inter­act­ing with data that are intended to remain pri­vate yet acces­si­ble any­where. Although some courts have recently rec­og­nized lim­ited pro­tec­tion for e-mails and text mes­sages, these nar­row hold­ings are not uni­ver­sal. The third-party doc­trine fur­ther com­pli­cates the issue when con­tent and quasi-transactional data are being stored by cloud ser­vice providers.