Entrepreneurship, sometimes it's just about doing the sums

Security in anonymity

Amazon have had some recent outages (Bots to blame for Amazon.com outages? | The Register) which raise a spectre of doubt for me over the viability of cloud computing services.

These services allow smaller organisations to benefit from large investments in computing power made by a small number of organisations, Amazon, Google, etc and buy IT infrastructure as a service.

The concern for me is that they provide a very, very big and obvious target for people of nefarious intent to aim at. Global brands like Amazon represent a prize for hackers and it would seem if one goes down, everyone goes down. Their being S3 services were affected as well, taking down all customers services that rely on them.

Doing it for yourself, on your own servers gives you the protection of the crowd in much the same way as being in a shoal of fish provides protection to the individual members from predators. Of course, you have to do a certain amount of self protection but being far less likely to be a target makes that a lot cheaper.

The counter argument is that these large cloud services organisations have the resources to hire the best defensive minds in the business to protect their investment, a level you couldn't possible afford or justify on your own. The problem is that these people are defending against the best attacking minds in the business because they're protecting the biggest prize, it's a classic arms race.

Another argument is that these services allow you to scale your service rapidly in the face of unprecedented demand. You never know, your service might become de rigueur and in the Internet world that means millions of hits.'You only get one chance'.

Entrepreneurs lap this one up, being the eternal optimists that we have to be to survive the start-up trials, of course my service is 'the one' I'm just waiting for the market to realise and then I'll be ready. Looking at it a little more pragmatically, this is a million to one shot.

What's more likely, should your business succeed, is that growth may well accelerate but not more than is copable with. The trick is to architect your service so you can rapidly scale it, then it just becomes an issue of cash hardware. If you've got your business model straight then this shouldn't be a problem.

So, home grown for me. It's not hard or expensive these days with so many open source services and stiff competition in the ISP market; and I haven't even got onto the perils of locking your pride and joy to a proprietary app hosting architecture.

Wrestling with low-lifes

Running an ecommerce site as we do, we get exposed to all sorts of fraudulent attempts to purchase our SMS services with stolen credit cards.

We've put all sorts of checks and restrictions in place to try and prevent this before we even submit the payment for processing by our merchant service but there's a background task to keep them up to date.

Sometimes I look at the number of people involved in development and strategy meetings on this subject and feel a mix of aggrievement and frustration.

Don't get me wrong it's not a big problem that we spend lot's of time on. It's just that we do spend time on it, it's just dead time. We're not moving the service on, we're just working to stand still. All because someone has decided that stealing is a legitimate approach to making a living.

Part of what drives me and the team is the gladitorial challenge of legitimate business competition. How can we differentiate our service, be first to provide the customer wants, be best at providing it. Fighting with low-lifes is no fun at all.

Rant over, thanks for listening

The Bay Area Buzz

One of the keynote sessions included an interview with Tariq Karim, founder and CEO of NetVibes, who talked about the Bay Area buzz. He tries to make sure he get's out to San Francisco every couple of months to get is entrepreneurial and createive mojo recharged.

Having experienced it myself on my recent visit, I was good to hear that someone else also found it infectious.

Europe does seem to be difference, there is some fantastic stuff happening but it's a lot harder to find. I wonder if because so much is happening around San Francisco the good stuff has something to rise up above and gets prominence very quickly.

It just goes to show that despite all this virtual interaction and location independet collaboration. Actually meeting and interacting with people face to face is what really makes things happen.