Jack Black may not have had to worry about IT challenges in his 2003 movie “School of Rock,” but the real of School of Rock does. The music program, which encourages its students to rock on stage and in life, was founded as a single music school in Philadelphia in 1998. Almost fifteen years later, it’s now an international franchise, operating…

Earlier today, we announced the close of a $25 million round in series C financing led by Sequoia Capital. We’re very lucky to add the Sequoia team to our list of amazing investors – which already includes Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Greylock Partners, and FLOODGATE. The details are highlighted in the press release, but I’d like to share…

As we approach the close of the fourth quarter, many of you will be evaluating the investments your company has made in the way of cloud computing and will consequently consider how to maximize these investments. Ray Wang and the Constellation Research team have jump-started the process for you with a new tool, “The Enterprise Cloud Buyer’s Bill…

In enterprise software and services, there’s one thing you can always count on: vendor marketing teams delivering glossy customer case studies. Well, Okta does those too, we can’t lie. But ours are better. The best customer case studies are those done by third parties. Forrester Consulting recently spent time analyzing identity management at…

The New York Times recently ran an interesting profile of Peter Neumann, one of the preeminent computer scientists in the world. The story, “Killing the Computer to Save it,” details Neumann’s ideas for how to solve the inherent security vulnerabilities in computer systems that have been repeated again and again for the past 50+ years. Neumann’s…

Last week, Ars Technica’s Dan Goodin published a story detailing how downloaded Android applications have the potential to expose the sensitive personal data of more than 185 million users. Vulnerabilities due to inadequate or incorrect use of SSL/TLS protocol libraries expose everything from online banking and social networking credentials to e…

During the past few weeks, I’ve written about what it takes to build a cloud service that’s ready for the enterprise. Essentially, there are three characteristics that set true enterprise cloud services apart from their consumer counterparts: Security. Reliability. Trust. When evaluating an enterprise cloud service for those characteristics, there…

Verification has been making the news lately. Earlier this month, Box announced that it was adding a two-step login verification, just weeks after Dropbox added two-step verification. And it was Wired journalist Mat Honan’s devastating personal identity hack in August that inspired my blog series on what it takes to build secure cloud services for…

Last week, I posted the fourth installment in a six-part blog series about what it takes to have an enterprise-ready cloud service and the three characteristics (security, reliability and trust) that differentiate an enterprise cloud service from a typical consumer cloud service. In this series, I’ve discussed five aspects to look at when…

I recently released the first, second and third installments of a six-part blog series about what it takes to have an enterprise-ready cloud service, and the three characteristics that differentiate an enterprise-grade cloud service from a typical consumer service: security, reliability and trust. As a quick refresher, there are five categories to…