Thoughts from HostingCon - Regulatory compliance.

Yesterday I attended Michael Dodson’s HostingCon presentation entitled “Email Takes Center Stage for Managed Services.”  Michael  talked a bit about how regulatory issues affect e-mail services, and how figuring out how HIPPA, SOX and other laws that govern the way certain industries use e-mail might affect your services, could give you a marketing leg up.  I couldn’t agree more.  This morning, I attended today's keynote in which Chris Gladwin CTO and Chairman of the Board of CleverSafe talked about disbursed storage.  He also talked about the great opportunities for selling storage that have been created by new laws that require data to be kept for significant periods of time.

One of the goals of my practice has always been to give my clients advice that helps their bottom line.  I can’t think of a better way do that than to take a few hours to determine which laws might impact your customers.  To my knowledge, only one of my clients has fully embraced this proposition, and has been highly successful at it.  Another way of thinking about legal advice, is that you may be able to leverage the advice you get to bring your company into compliance by using that same advice to market to customers.  This could give you a great way of differentiating yourself.

As a side note, the technology that Cleversafe is using is TOTALLY cool!  If you haven't taken a look at it, you're missing some great stuff.