For large corporations with dedicated IT security departments, the benefits are less clear. This is also true for small organizations they are more secure than they would be if they tried to do it themselves. Automatic updates have increased security dramatically. Automatic backup has saved a lot of data after hardware failures, user mistakes, and malware infections. These companies are much better at security than the average user. To be sure, feudal security has its advantages. Other feudal lords are smaller and more specialized - Amazon, Yahoo, Verizon, and so on - but the model is the same. Facebook is another lord, controlling much of the socializing we do on the Internet. Google and Apple are the obvious ones, but Microsoft is trying to control both user data and the end-user platform as well. There are a lot of feudal lords out there. We become their vassals or, on a bad day, their serfs. And if we pledge complete allegiance to them - if we let them control our email and calendar and address book and photos and everything - we get even more benefits. We cede control of our data and computing platforms to these companies and trust that they will treat us well and protect us from harm. But it is inherently a feudal relationship. The benefits are enormous, from cost to convenience to reliability to security itself. There are a lot of good reasons why we’re all flocking to these cloud services and vendor-controlled platforms. I have so little visibility into the security of Facebook that I have no idea what operating system they’re using. Updates on my Kindle happen automatically, without my knowledge or consent. I can’t delete cookies on my iPad or ensure that files are securely erased. I can’t audit any of these cloud services. I can’t demand greater security for my presentations on Prezi or my task list on Trello, no matter how confidential they are. I have no control over the security of my Gmail or my photos on Flickr. The new security model is that someone else takes care of it - without telling us any of the details. All of these places are owned by someone. We now use our vendor-controlled computing devices to go places. We used to use our computers to do things. Meanwhile, our relationship with IT has changed. The second means that our new internet devices are both closed and controlled by the vendors, giving us limited configuration control: iPhones, ChromeBooks, Kindles, Blackberries. The first means that most of our data resides on other networks: Google Docs,, Facebook, Gmail. Now that the IT industry has matured, we expect more security “out of the box.” This has become possible largely because of two technology trends: cloud computing and vendor-controlled platforms. Normally we expect the products and services we buy to be safe and secure, but in IT we tolerated lousy products and supported an enormous aftermarket for security.
#Another word for things we have no control over software
Users purchased their own antivirus software and firewalls, and any breaches were blamed on their inattentiveness. Traditionally, computer security was the user’s responsibility. This power shift affects many things, and it profoundly affects security. Power has shifted in IT, in favor of both cloud-service providers and closed-platform vendors. These are feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and serfs. These are not traditional companies, and we are not traditional customers. If you’ve started to think of yourself as a hapless peasant in a Game of Thrones power struggle, you’re more right than you may realize. Both Twitter and LinkedIn have recently suffered security breaches that affected the data of hundreds of thousands of their users. Microsoft might be cooperating with some governments to spy on Skype calls, but we don’t know which ones. Apple prohibits all iPhone apps that are political or sexual. Google has stopped supporting its popular RSS feeder. Facebook regularly abuses the privacy of its users.
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