YES, in fact a resounding yes! I know I know, most security purist think about security breaches as encryption, or malicious hackers but remember 85% of security breaches come from 3 causes, listed in order of most common to least common.
- Lost computers and storage devices, Georgetown University established the following guidelines for students and faculty for lost or stolen laptops, or a removeable disk drives. Not a bad starting point if you have yet to develop your own policy.
- Human error from employees or partners, and
- Illegal or malicious activities by criminals.
To determine if data is safer in the cloud, its a matter of comparing what you have, to what the cloud provides. How does a cloud provider’s data center compare to that of a small or medium size company?
Consider most cloud providers have a substantial investment in their infrastructure. We work really hard trying to protect our customers from outages and the impact an outage can have on data.
Being in a position where a power outage shuts down servers that house data is NOT a position any IT professional wants to be in, but, just in case, there is good documentation “How to Recover a master data base file”, from Tech Republic. Just plan on having your best people unavailable for several hours as they work the process of recovery.
Another factor, how is data accessed now? How many remote users are connecting to the corporate network from various internet connections around the World. A server in the cloud will not compromise a data breech any more than that of a sales rep accessing the order entry system from a remote hotel wifi hot spot.
Lastly, when we look at data specifically, most cloud providers have a resilient SAN environment in place. Some will have a configuration that separates the data from the OS layer, which means if a server fails, your data is still safe because it resides on a separate platform.
The bottom line is make sure you have a good loss prevention policy, train your employees well and begin the process of migrating to the cloud. By moving to the cloud most businesses will see a substantial leap ahead in security and data protection. Why? A cloud providers reputation depends on it!
Souce: Trused ID, www.trustedid.com
Nathan Fultz
Email: nathan@profitability.net
Twitter: http://twitter.com/AppicaCloud
Web: http://www.appica.com/nathan
Tags: cloud strategy, CloudComputing, Data Center, IaaS, IaaS cloud security, Servers, Technology