On Monday, Joseph Menn of the Financial Times posted an article titled: Security Experts Find Flaws in Cloud Computing.

I agree that if the cloud vendors don’t get serious about securing critical business information, then the cases like Twitter’s will get worse and worse. The negligence on the part of players like these not only puts valuable information at risk, but also reflects badly on other service providers who have invested in security and provide business grade services. But in the end, clouds are here to stay. The burden will be on both the companies who utilize clouds as well as the media to educate consumers and professionals on the applications that are appropriate – and secure enough – for their needs.

We're swimming in a sea of documents - and there's research to prove it. When I recently re-read the 2008 Gartner Summit presentation "Understanding ECM and Its Strategic Value," I was surprised to see that more than half of the 190 organizations surveyed had between 6 and 15 separate content repositories at their companies. Another 17% had 16 repositories or more!

The sheer number of places where companies keep their critical information is truly astounding and I believe it is one of the biggest overarching problems in the realm of managing business information today. At the same Gartner Summit referenced above, research indicated that redundant and outdated information constitutes 50-90% of what we manage. So let me rephrase: We're swimming in a sea of old, redundant and often useless information.

You might think this problem could only exist within large companies like the Fortune 1000. Their size, employee base and regional footprint exacerbate the challenge of managing the vast amounts of the company's intellectual property.

It is my observation that businesses are ready to move more of their most sensitive information to the cloud. For that to happen - SaaS providers need to support strong security measures to protect the data. SaaS solves many problems for an IT manager, but at the same time introduces some issues of its own. I will focus on one major shortcoming that, if not addressed, will cripple the adoption of SaaS. Fortunately, that flaw can be fixed with some goodwill and foresight. I refer to widely adopted weak authentication mechanisms - customers are given only the good old email/password combination, except for online banking.