A recent report by Gartner listed The Cloud saying you cant trust the cloud providers to protect your data. Those that know me are aware that I don’t trust cloud providers with all my data. I have expressed questions such as;
What happens when the company goes under like megaupload?
What happens when you dump the cloud provider?
Do they erase your stored data or does it still exist some place?
The part that keeps me up at night is who has access tot he data center?
Who has root access to the servers where my data is stored?
Can they be trusted?
What kind of background checks are done on there employees?
Security remains a top concern for companies looking to deploy a cloud strategy. There is an interesting word cloud strategy well as most of you know companies like Microsoft and HP want to get away from internal storage. Companies like HP are pushing for cloud bases systems management to allow ease of out of band management. Microsoft wants to stop housing e-mail servers internally and allow Microsoft to host your e-mail at a discount rate. This is a great way for Microsoft to cut there support cost and for you to save licensing. Now most people look at 2 thinks money and down time. What if we loose our network connection well we can risk it because of the money we are saving on not having an e-mail server. But they never factor in the risk factor of someone reading there e-mail.
What if someone should read your e-mail to the patine office?
What if they read your trade secrete e-mails?
Remember if your e-mail is hosted outside your company even internal e-mails can be read by the root password owner or the administrator.
What about security breaches how does your hoster handle them?
A company like Microsoft would have something for you to sign that might clear up most of these concerns but what about your small business hosting provider or that hosting startup they may not be so secure or may not report known security breaches.
What about the breaches they don’t know about?