bedatadriven

We switched from Wistia to their video streaming offer and literally decimated our video hosting costs. Exactly what we needed with none of the upselling B.S.

Compliance with what requires KYC? Nothing in ISO-27001 requires you to collect any information about your customers. Unless there are laws that require you to. Knowing your vendors is another story.

The standards are very sensible. If you can't be bothered to provide even simple evidence that your employees are using basic harddrive encryption, use password managers, and your product has backup in place, I don't want to do business with you.

And Delve isn't an auditor. Though they were apparently in cohoots with equally criminal third party auditors. So I guess I'm going to be looking more closely at just exactly who exactly are auditing our vendors in the future...

Well, yes, but that's the point of many contracts, they are often designed to shift risk to parties that are better equipped to handle those risks. We run our app on GCP because as a 20 person company I don't want to be responsible for physical security and a million other risks.

With ISO27001 or SOC 2, I have more information about the other party's ability to manage those risks than just taking their word for it. I'm trusting a third party auditor to vouch for them.

Fraud undermines all kinds of relationships and yes LLMs make it worse. The last job we opened I got hundreds of perfect cover letters asserting the candidates met all of the criteria. Bah.

My perhaps naive hope is that a few of these companies involved will face criminal fraud charges and we will start to develop new reflexes as a society that just bc LLMs making lying very very easy, there are still consequences.

I don't want to work wherever you do your thing. Software as a service means you provide a service, and you should take your responsibility to protect your customer's data super seriously. Compliance frameworks are one useful tool among many to support this effort. It helps us identify gaps, identify risks, make improvements. It also give us a way to communicate what we do to our partners. The behavior described in the medium post is fraud, pure and simple.

I am a founder, and my ambition includes meeting the highest possible standards for my customers.

I can remember something like this a few years ago when a customer emailed our helpdesk with their own internal IT support desk in copy. Our helpdesk at the time sent a complete new email acknowledging the request, which the customer's desk ALSO acknowledged in a new thread...

I think it took us a good hour and a few hundred tickets to get the helpdesks to stop fighting with each other!

One thing that is real is companies using LLMs to fill roles they couldn't afford to spend on before. Like the tourist who uses Google Translate on a trip to Japan: in principle they are saving 10k on the cost of a professional interpreter. On the other hand they never would have had the resources for a professional interpreter.

I've been looking at this a lot, for ourselves (multitenant saas app running on gcp) and for our customers, who are starting to be curious about something between fully self-managed (too costly) and centralized/multi-tenant/american cloud.

One thing that strikes me is the relationship with architecture. A monolithic, vertically scaled app can run ANYWHERE where I can rent a VM, whether in Norway with Upcloud or on a VPS in Kenya. It's only when you start stitching together managed DBs with autoscaled instance pools etc that vendor lock in begins.

All of these nice toys make our service highly available. But while the overall risk is lower, it is far more correlated between customers. If our service would go down because of a political event, it would go down for all our customers at once.

What about a control plane that manages a fleet of per-customer VMs across an array of cloud providers? Has anyone ever tried this?

You are off by one f.

A record's fields are final, so records are immutable (though they can include immutable pointers to mutable objects)