What is Happening?  Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services was granted the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certification, becoming the 3^rd company so far to be approved for broad federal use. The certification comes after an exhaustive security and compliance assessment was sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, enabling AWS to enter the pool of companies seeking the certification.

The FedRAMP certification program was initially launched in 2010 but was not finalized until June of 2012, with the first certified company following in December 2012. Created by a collaboration between several government organizations including the Federal CIO Council, the goal was to reduce the time and effort of redundant assessments being conducted by each agency attempting to move to cloud services by providing a general level of assurance across organizations that a given cloud service met a predefined set of requirements.

What is Happening?  The components of the new Master Architecture have accelerated rapidly to a level of business relevance since we first described it last year (1052CLS, Boundary-free Enterprise™: Empowered by the New Master Architecture, 11Apr2012). Cloud, Mobile, Social, Analytics, and Integration (CSMA/I) have all become part of strategies for forward-looking IT organizations.

Saugatuck’s current research on the adoption and use of these same strategies indicates two important trends:

What is Happening?  This week has been full of Cloud Big Data and analytics announcements. From Intel to Microsoft, RedHat to VMware, IBM to Informatica, we’ve seen a series of rollouts, enhancements, extensions and open source contributions.

The consensus of Saugatuck’s discussions this week with provider and user enterprise executives is that the majority of provider activity consists of positioning themselves for future, expected opportunities; and the majority of user enterprise activity consists of interest, searches for knowledge, trials, and PoCs.

What is Happening?  A recent article in The New Yorker by Columbia University professor Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch, once again raises the question of whether technology providers perform better when they are “open” or “closed.” In his New Yorker article, Wu makes the claim that a tech provider generally does better when it is open, unless it is run by a genius (e.g., Steve Jobs) who can make faster, more proactive decisions that enable the company to move more nimbly and make fewer market mistakes.

While we agree that companies have historically exhibited the characteristics and capabilities Wu describes, overall we believe that a confluence of market shifts, changes in buying patterns, and the emergence of a new master Business and IT architecture - driven by Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Analytics (CMSA), stitched together with Integration - presents a means of bypassing this debate of open vs. closed in a very real way – in short, Saugatuck’s Boundary-free Enterprise™ (BfE) model.

Bring your own technology (BYOT) – the practice of allowing employees to bring their own devices, applications, clouds, and services is expanding within the enterprise. Though at many companies the focus is still on devices, we see the associated host of other technologies as a close follower, complicating the tasks of enterprise IT to both plan for, and manage their own data security while still enabling work on these devices.

Going through the benefits and concerns that BYOT policies present, often looks like an argument that suggests an immediate ban on BYOT is the only viable solution. Though the reduction in capital expenses on the devices themselves might be compelling for some users, the added complexity of managing more types of devices and more data makes this seem like an uneven trade. Additionally, because the devices are not company owned, but still personal, the management of the device must be more subtle – meaning that the simple approach of complete device lockdown in not viable.