Thought Leadership Programme
FAST IiS look to harness the knowledge of our member base to provide “Thought Leadership” on emerging issues and technologies affecting the management and licensing of business applications and information. Sign up here to receive regular updates
Data Loss Prevention
Over the past twelve months the news headlines have been dominated by stories of high profile data security breaches. No sector of the economy has been unaffected by the seemingly unstoppable torrent of bad news.
These events have also drawn attention to the need for organizations to implement “Privacy Enhancing Technologies” (PETs). In the following paper Field Fisher Waterhouse, member of the Federation’s Legal Advisory Group provides an overview of the issues and regulatory framework driving “Data Loss Prevention” (DLP) technologies.
Click here to download the paper – FAST DLP Position Paper
Open Source in the mainstream: Legal Implications
Everyone agrees that Open Source Software offers exciting opportunities to businesses and that its use will only become more pervasive over time. So where does this leave legal counsel or management who must decide how best to exploit the software whilst remaining compliant with licensing conditions? To appreciate and advise on the risks fully, it is necessary also to understand something of how the Open Source Software will be used, in particular how it will interact with other Open Source and proprietary software and how that use will be perceived by activists in the Open Source movement. These are the building blocks for constructing an effective but practical strategy.
In the following paper, Kemp Little, members of the Federation’s Legal Advisory Group, provide an overview of key OSS licenses and cases, examine the knottier legal issues that frequently arise and take a practical look at OSS inside the organization.
Click here to download the paper – FAST Introduction to Open Source
Virtualisation and Grid: a fundamental challenge to the software licensing model?
Virtualisation has spread like wildfire through the data centres of UK organizations. Before virtualisation it was relatively easy to keep control of business IT expenditure through the assigned hardware costs and software applications licensed to execute upon them.
On Thursday 10 April we heard from David Gittins, Capgemini who has been working with the public sector on this challenge; Neil Sanderson, Product Manager for Virtualisation at Microsoft and Mark Cresswell of Scalable Solutions, a leader in the provision of tools for monitoring and reporting usage. The webinar, which was co-hosted by FAST and Grid Computing Now! opened with an overview of software licensing scene by Ian Osborne, Project Director of Grid Computing Now, who also facilitated the Question and Answer session. Grid Computing Now! is working closely with FAST IiS to bring insight and understanding to this issue for IT managers in all sectors of the industry.