Data In The Cloud

Mozilla's chief executive painted a picture of dismissive and clueless ad industry CEOs, uncertain about how to move forward on consumer privacy issues, in a series of media interviews published this week.

Since the '90s, the sofware-as-a-service (SaaS) model has been applied to many categories of software, including customer relationship management and marketing automation tools. But applications are just part of the story for a new "network-empowered" direct marketing industry. Beyond software, marketing data and lists can also be delivered using an on-demand model.

Network Solutions, a provider of Web-related services for small and medium businesses, has started reaching out to customers about a data breach that was discovered in early June. Credit card information on 573,928 individual consumers may have been compromised in the breach, which Network Solutions publicly reported at the end of the day on July 24.