I came across Werner Vogels’ blog (CTO of Amazon) today where he explains his side of the “confrontation” between himself and Shel Israel and Robert Scoble (noted authors of Naked Conversations). And it is absolutely refreshing to see how a seasoned web-based company reacts to the “me-too ‘isms” of the internet.

In 5 years how will the world treat the massive swing towards business blogging? Is there a concrete measurable value? No doubt there will be for many companies. But how many companies that jumped in and started blogging “just because” will benefit?

Well, I was able to take some time off last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to spend with the fam during spring break. We chose to go riding at a couple of places up north. One was the Red River Motorcycle Trails. Wow, that place is huge! With 2,500 acres it’s easy to get lost out there.

Paige did great and had her first trips through creeks on her Motorcycle. The sand was a bit rough for her — but she got several miles of good riding experience under her belt. We are definately planning on going back to the Red River Trails and spending some time camping and making it a multi-day outing!

With spring break quickly upon us again, the fam is ready to set off on a few days of riding later this week. So the bikes are all tuned up and we’re plotting the places to ride for about 4 days.

More pictures and a riding report to follow!

In my previous professional position, I was in charge of security for an international managed services company — Data Return, LLC. I constantly worked with fortune 500 to fortune 1000 companies who are more and more integrating security standards into their managed services contracts. This is common throughout the industry as companies are attempting to shift liability wherever possible. The result is 2 (at least 2) drastically different views on security — “book security” vs. “practical security.”

Book Security is very simply security by the book. Which is never really fully possible. This is the level of security that your auditors, customers and business partners want to think that you have. And you want to think that your vendors have this level of security. Let me let you onto a little secret…..they don’t.

Practical Security is having a practical amount of security for your business and budget. This level of security can be achieved at a reasonable cost to functionality and budget. It’s keeping the security at this level that is the real challenge.

So where am I going with all of this? As a security professional I continue to look at the ever increasing bar. It raises with each passing standard. You now have federal requirements, state requirements, industry requirements, vendor requirements, etc, etc. Then there’s Google.

A recent post on Yahoo reveals a new concept for Google called “GDrive” where a user can merely store all of their information with Google, least their system crash. I’m of the mindset that the Google desktop search makes me so nervous that won’t install it.

Now I know Google has to be dealing with the same types of security standards as the rest of the industry. And by no means am I questioning the business strategies of the great minds of Google (as I genuflect), but it seems to me that the continued move towards the aggregation and indexing of all of the worlds data is directly opposed to where the security/privacy/legal world is going.

So how do they get there from here? The mere thought of the GDrive sends security, legal and privacy professionals screaming towards their local bars at top speed. But surely Google has to have an answer for this? Don’t they?