The News

A giant question of the 11th day of January 2021 is: should anyone trust any service with their personal data?

Without wasting an ounce a milliliter on any political commentary, I’ll admit that the news regarding Parler’s shutdown is on my mind. You might not be aware that there was also a breach of data related to Twilio authentication* that has a lot of people concerned about the trust they put into the Parler service (Twitter clone for those who spared themselves any wasted time understanding the great microblog wars).

*My money is on Twilio’s customer being responsible for poor authN and authZ implementations. Likely not the fault of Twilio aside from revealing the authentication method used… and that information shouldn’t be sensitive in the first place.

Who really cares?

Of course, some of the users effected by this and other recent news about leaky, creaky tech services are real people who lead teams, run companies, buy services from third parties for their companies. Within their companies, these people are likely to wonder how much they leak from the services that they use (mostly paid, some free).

Decentralized thinking

The Parler hack appears to be run by activist hackers (hacktivists). What if the activism behind the hacker is a deep, guttural passion for how much more they’d like your competition to win? (Psst, it might even be your competition but only a couple of LLCs removed… like a cousin thing.)

As people wise up to the stickiness of the revised ethics of 2020, I have to wonder if there will be wide interest in a list of services that you can run yourself in 2021 and onward. When thinking about all the gravity that you put into your company, should you continue to trust important conversations with customers, partners, and employees to Salesforce? Zoom? Cisco? Microsoft? Any-number-of-other-big-examples? Can you instead have an essentially portable service that can be deployed where it’s needed (cloud or otherwise) while having only your employees/staff in FULL control of data and infrastructure?

If you’ve never heard of Terraform, don’t really get all the fuss about Kubernetes, or think of containers as little more than smart guy emojis (🧐, 🤓, or 😎) then you probably think that you have no choice and can only pick from these highly centralized, managed (looted? …hope not) services/SaaS/Cloud Services.

If you doubt how good these can be, check out: NextCloud. I have run this from a chart file on a home server with just a few keystrokes. Maybe it’s not enterprise-grade, but could it be?

There’s some work to be done to make this feasible end-to-end on most product/services teams, but I have no doubt that any decentralized services will make the giant service providers look like they’re running the DMV in the not-so-distant future. Of course some of them will just be running CPU cycles, storage, networking, power for workloads that they don’t get to peer into or trip up anymore.

Perhaps the bigger question of the day: should any company trust their intimate customer, partner, and employee relationships to any third party? Maybe today is too soon… tomorrow? A year from now? My money is on decentralized tech services as an imminent trend in a handful of core business functions that have big-company SaaS offerings, possibly conferencing winding up at the tip of the spear.