It’s been interesting, to say the least, to watch how people and companies behave during the current problems in the financial sector. It’s given me just a hint of how people must’ve felt at the onset of the great depression, when there were runs on the banks. Knock on wood, we don’t seem to be headed for large scale runs on the banks this time around, and I think that the underlying reason is that people today have more confidence that their money is secure with their bank. And they certainly seem to believe that their money is more secure with a bank than it would be under their mattresses.
That realization has led me to an analogy about companies’ willingness to store their information with someone else, rather than keeping it on their own servers and PCs. As with cash, it’s tempting to feel that your information is more secure if it’s on your own machines, under your own control. However, I think that this feeling of security is largely an illusion. Today, “security breaches” are more ho-hum than they are the result of sophisticated, stealthy hacker attacks. For example, a company is much more likely to lose control of information through lost and stolen laptops than through a sophisticated hacker attack from Eastern Europe that overcomes multiple security layers protecting a network.
This is pertinent, of course, to TrackVia given that we’re in the business of providing our customers with both a great database application and online access to, and storage of, their information. In that sense, we’re a bank that stores and protects your information for you, a secure online database. Even though the model of hosted applications like TrackVia isn’t new (it’s been called the ASP model, Software-as-a-Service, etc.) I think that the time has come when most companies are willing to trust that their information is safer with us than it is under their mattress.
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