Hugging the Wrong Tree?

 

October 24 is World Paper Free Day. It’s an opportunity to remind ourselves about how far we still have to go towards a significant reduction of paper consumption. Particularly in the office, the amount of paper still in use is mind-blowing. We have been predicting a paper-free office for decades and yet it appears that we have a long way to go. Every one of us knows someone who still prints out all his or her emails… The World Paper Free Day is a worthy cause that we should all be behind. In fact, it shouldn’t be just for a day but for a year. Every year.

Wait a minute. Is it really the most important cause? Don’t take me wrong—I may not be wearing Birkenstocks, but I am closer to a tree hugger than a city slicker. Mass scale deforestation is a huge problem. Trees generate oxygen, provide animal habitat, give us shade, prevent erosion, and retain water. Trees are vital to our survival, and we need to protect them. And yet…trees are a renewal resource!

The fact is that trees do grow back, and trees for paper mills are being planted in managed timberlands based on a long-term plan. 84-91% of paper pulp is made from waste wood that was traditionally burned, and paper itself is a highly recyclable material. Newspapers, for example, are printed on paper that is made of 20-100% recycled material, and about 75% of print paper in the US is being recovered. Paper is also non-toxic and relatively benign as a pollutant—out of all things that end up in the landfill, paper is the least of our problems.

The next question is: what is replacing paper? Sure, bits and bytes in our computers, tablets, and e-readers. But those bits and bytes require energy to run, and in the case of Amazon, Apple, or Google, the “electronic paper” comes out of massive datacenters that require huge amounts of energy. That energy comes from burning oil or coal, which is hardly benign. Also, all those electronics have a limited life expectancy, and the old, replaced models represent a massive pollution issue. They are a huge problem in landfills.

We should perhaps focus our efforts on solving a bigger problem than the elimination of paper. Sure, there are other good reasons to eliminate paper than ecological: paper is perishable and thus not reliable as a way to preserve information, paper is hard to search and process, paper takes too much space to store…I could go on and on—I have been marketing these benefits for years. But a World Oil Free Day would make a much bigger difference. After all, unlike the price of oil, the price of paper is not really impacting the health of the global economy, and I don’t think there has ever been a war started because of paper…

Happy World Paper Free Day! 

Is Cloud More Secure Than On-Premises Software?

Security is the most common objection people - or companies - raise against the adoption of a cloud based solution. There have certainly been enough stories reported about compromised passwords and other security breaches at cloud based services such as Dropbox or iCloud. Emotionally, it feels like having our data stored somewhere where we can’t see it is just not very secure.

But let’s face it, we’ve had our money stored somewhere where we can’t see it for decades. Yet we seem to be completely trusting of our banks. Nobody is arguing that our money would be more secure under our mattresses. Quite the contrary, we rush to put our money into the banks knowing full well that the bank doesn’t actually keep the money. At the end of the day, it is just an entry in a computer database somewhere...somewhere...in a cloud. Or private cloud to be more precise. In any case, we consider banks highly secure today.

And so, the latest argument about cloud security goes in the opposite direction. We are beginning to realize that the cloud companies have more at stake, and so they are likely investing into security more so than a typical company ever would or could afford for its on-premises software.

Let’s take an example. Thousands of companies across North America have been using ADP to process their payroll for many years. ADP’s payroll processing is a cloud based application - it has been long before we knew what the cloud was all about. ADP even offers to outsource the service, not just the app.  Yet as far as security goes, nobody is screaming that it is preposterous having all the highly confidential personal data stored at ADP. In fact, most people think that it is probably safer at ADP than it would be if processed by their own employer.

Indeed, cloud companies are increasingly considered capable of providing more security features than companies running on-premises software. Just yesterday, Dropbox raised the bar by rolling out a two-factor authentication. How many of your on-premises applications have that?

But then again, the cloud companies are a much bigger and more attractive target for the bad guys. The hackers might never pay attention to your company and your data center but they sure know about Google Apps, Dropbox, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Apple iCloud. Hacking a big name cloud company is just a very lucrative target that many hackers see as a challenge they can’t resist.

So what gives? Is our data more secure on-premises or in the cloud? Well, I suppose there is no black-and-white answer out there today. There are many considerations that need to go into software selection - on-premises or in the cloud. Security is certainly one of them. And we can be sure that the security debate will remain a hot one for quite a while.