Virtual peace of mind

Here's a harrowing tale that highlights an opportunity for service providers…

Risk management is all the buzz — and with good reason. The proper assessment and mitigation of risks permeate our personal and professional lives. In our increasingly always-on and all-ways-connected world, some of our biggest risks relate to our digital persona: that stuff on our many devices. What if it gets violated — or worse, expunged? The latter happened to my 18-year-old son, a freshman at the University of Florida, a week before Thanksgiving. During exams, his Dell laptop's hard drive fatally crashed.

Since college kids can't go a nanosecond without cell phones or PCs, my PC went to Florida overnight. It did not bring back his data, which, like most college kids, he had barely backed up. Luckily, because of e-mails with us (don't ask), the damage was not cataclysmic. I bore the brunt of dealing with Dell. Two hard drives, a disk drive, new motherboard, new memory, new OS software, 15-plus hours of phone time with Dell support, a visit from an outsourced technician and one new computer (sans wireless local area network card) later, I gave up. I asked for, and was told I'd get, a prompt and total refund. Just after Christmas — I was now voice and e-mail pals with Dell's senior executive of “customer experience” and his staff — Dell's loading dock finally accepted the original broken PC and new WLAN-less one. My account was credited. But as we all know, losing your hard drive, no matter your age or life station, is really bad for your health. Visit the many “I hate (fill in the PC vendor name)” Web sites if you want to experience real angst.

What does this have to do with service providers? Everything.

We can't live without “MyWare,” the hardware and software that digitally defines us. Let's admit that PC partitions to restore working hard drives to a static state, detachable storage that can be misplaced or destroyed, and the need to not only replace a hard drive but also reload apps and updates is time poorly spent, whether at home or work. The ultimate in techno-risk needs mitigation.

The answer could be a hosted remote storage network service that automatically uploads anything related to MyWare that has changed since the last upload — and does so in a trustworthy environment. PC vendors are starting to offer something like this, as are a variety of others. Wake up call to telecom companies: There is gold in hosting a real-time secure version of “V.Me”: the virtual me.

I believe people like me — the physical me — will pay real money for a lights-out service that guards the most up-to-date version of our MyWare, protecting us from all shapes and forms of malware. Who better than service providers to make this part of a converged broadband services bundle to win this emerging market? There is money in keeping people's entire digital profile current, safe and secure. And when it comes to risk management, we want to be safe and secure, but we also prefer having only one entity to deal with. There are alliances to be made, business models to ponder, marketing efforts to initiate, analysts to wow, etc. This could be big — really, really big — and while I truly hate this word, it's accurate: sticky.

I'm ready to pay for an improved way to create virtual peace of mind — and so are many others.

Peter A. Bernstein is president of Peter A. Bernstein Associates. He can be reached at pabernstein@optonline.net.