Most of the commentary written about companies moving to the Cloud focuses on the loss of control over company data as a consequence of giving up self-hosted infrastructure. There is usually an implication that this is bad. I believe that is not necessarily a given. How may stories do you read daily about data breaches unrelated to the cloud? It's almost cliche now.
The critical question that must be asked is "Can cloud provider X protect your company's data better than you can?".
In many cases, the answer is yes. Basically [ in most cases] they do security better than you do. They can afford to hire more security staff and deploy a more robust security infrastructure. Their business depends on it. In a presentation I gave some time ago on cloud computing located here, I listed the following as additional reasons why:
- Security measures are cheaper when implemented on a large scale
- Better security provides competitive advantage to providers
- Increased standardization and industry collaboration
- Improved forensic capabilities and evidence gathering
- Improved resource scaling
Back of our aforementioned daily horror stories of data breaches. How many of those companies or organizations get closed down or do out of business due to their lax security practices? Not many. For cloud service providers, trust of their customers and potential customers is key to survival. Good security practices are not optional, they are a business imperative.
I've witness this first hand working for a financial industry application services provider. Long before "cloud" was a buzz word, there were Application Service Providers (ASPs) that basically performed Software as a Service ( SaaS). There was a strong culture of security at all levels of the company, from the board on down.
Giving up some control means trusting your provider. This also requires doing your due diligence in selecting the right provier and having a proper service level agreement in place that will allow you access to verify that they are indeed adequately protecting your data.
