Is it really down? I'm not so sure. From what I've observed, most saavy tech people where already aware of the security issues. I'm sure there were some (perhaps not quite as saavy?) tech people who were shocked by the recent revelations. Most Americans are not tech people, and if they have heard of the NSA scandals, are not shocked, nor terribly worried.
They are used to, and for the most part, willing to trust their tech people to do what is right.
Is Facebook usage down? Gmail? LinkedIn? Twitter? I doubt any of those SaaS services are hurting as a result of the NSA scandal, and those are some of the ones that were specifically mentioned as rich data sources for the g-men.
Most of the companies I've worked in over the past 15 years or so are driven Number One by tight deadlines. Anything that makes those deadlines easier to hit, is a welcomed part of the project. Member privacy and data security have not been priorities. Sure, they are important if you can do it, but not as important as hitting that deadline.
We need rapid deployment and flexible configurations for everything. The fast pace just keeps getting faster.
We've seen a rise in VM's, pre-staged servers, appliances, then AWS provisioning, and other infrastructure technology because rapid deployment and flexible configurations are paramount.
SaaS is even better, you don't have to mess with infrastructure at all.
>Is Facebook usage down? Gmail? LinkedIn? Twitter? I doubt any of those SaaS services are hurting as a result of the NSA scandal, and those are some of the ones that were specifically mentioned as rich data sources for the g-men.
The stories about the NSA breaking into foreign companies for economics reasons got less traction then the consumer social networks because they were less relevant to most of the public, but they are far more relevant to the people making operational decisions in non-US organisations that compete with US companies. For example, how many big Brazilian companies are going to trust Google Docs now that we know that Brazilian companies were spied on by the NSA to steal corporate secrets to aid American companies interests? For those organisations the risks are not theoretical ones about LOVEINT, personal privacy or a slippery slope into fascism. The risks are real and current and those companies are confirmed targets which the US will use any tactic to undermine. Non-American corporations are the targeted enemies of the NSA, and thus the targeted enemies of Amazon, Google and all the other US SaaS providers. For non-US corporations to use those services would be like Obama hosting his email with the North Korean government.
Yes. I work for a SaaS company in the financial sector and one of our offline competitors has just gained a chunk of our userbase due to this.
Why? Because someone is responsible for it at the end of the day and they don't want any data protection and security audits to show them up. That's the only reason.
