Once convinced of a cloud provider's security, companies must determine how comfortable they feel putting data and applications in the cloud. Most move slowly, often starting with one type of application – Salesforce’s CRM service, for example – or one type of activity, such as development and testing.
Only a brave few dive in as completely as Recurrent Energy, which finances, builds, and operates solar energy distribution systems. “We don’t have a data center now and hope we can keep it that way as our business grows,” says COO Wyatt. “We don’t think that maintaining hardware, database management systems, networks, application software, or identify management security benefits our business, so we prefer that someone else do that work for us.”
Besides the operating efficiency, Wyatt believes the cloud helps in collaboration with business partners. That’s where authentication systems play a key role. “We need to provide our financial partners with information about their projects but don’t want them looking at any of our proprietary data or possibly information from competitors,” says Wyatt.
Recurrent uses SpringCM Inc. ’s content management in the cloud service to meet that goal. The service stores a variety of business documents related to the building of energy distribution systems, from building blueprints to local, state, and federal construction regulations. The documents have to be stored for varying lengths – from a few months to decades – and have varying degrees of confidentiality. Sometimes, an employee needs to access one document held in a folder with a variety of other material. SpringCM provides the individual with access to that item but nothing else in the folder.
I fail to see how the issues around cloud security are any less (or more for that matter) than the concerns of outsourcing any aspect of IT. Perhaps it's the name. "Cloud" really doesn't sound stable does it? And yet Amazon, Google and even Microsoft have far more experience in keeping their infrastructures running, and secure, than most other organizations, especially SMB's.
What is the hang up? Granted, I think any organization should walk before they run into this arena, but we've been outsourcing computing resources and storing data on computers of such companies for years. Certainly you have to make sure that the outsourcing company is reputable and that they have resonable hiring and security practices. But who is more capable of doing this right, an organziation with the size and experience of Google or Amazon, or even a 200 person SMB (or 14,000 user state government for that matter)?
I'd put my money on the Google (who, if it isn't obvious by now, I do not think of as evil) Amazon or any other large well funded well managed IT innovation company.
I would be cautious about putting my data on Cloud-R-Us (can you say Internet bubble?) but I don't have any reservations about moving to the cloud, or the security of it.
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