Is all Data Right for the Cloud?
Should your private banking information or secret government files on where the Al Qaeda is hanging out in a cave in Afghanistan be stored on cloud data centers?
While a recent CIO.com survey found 46 percent of IT decision makers are investigating cloud storage services, there are lots of folks out there who don’t think certain types of information have any business there. A recent story on DaaS that I read in a mainstream (non-techie) newspaper quotes Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, saying that it’s not right for every type of data. Certain kinds of data will probably never make it to the cloud, the article quotes King as believing, including financial information and sensitive government documents.
Why?
Because privacy regulations and some very well-known data center security breaches make IT managers “squeamish,” says the story. I have certainly seen this attitude or sentiment among some of our clients, and I can understand why. It’s hard to pin down the nature of the cloud – where you aren’t sure where your data is stored. It’s a tough sell sometimes because companies like to know where their data is, and, more importantly, that it is encrypted during every single transmission.
It’s like you and I wanting to know where our teenagers are every night at 11 p.m. I can’t see them in their beds, so how do I know they’re okay.
So will our industry ever come up with a satisfactory way to address the doubts about security from CIO’s and IT managers? Take one area of security: There’s a long way to go before there is a single sign-on capability for all Web storage, although standards such as OAuth (to enable secure data access) are helping. In the story, a CIO at a company using the cloud for employees who need data backup for laptops, says cloud vendors will eventually figure out more secure ways of storage.
It’s as sure as when the IT industry “figured out network storage arrays, shared mainframe access and resolved other once-unattainable complexities.”