Is cloud secure?

1. The first question: Is data actually more secure when it is protected inside the cloud?

First and foremost, this relies much on the quality of your cloud storage company which is compared to that of your own department of information technology.

In fact, most of the main data breaches which have taken place from the last five years until now, such as Sony and Ashley Madison, to Talk Talk and Target, have been from internal databases, not those which are based on cloud. This news is given by Mister Amichai Shulman, the chief technology officer of cyber security firm named Imperva.

Nevertheless, also for him, there is always an inherent risk that administrative personnel working for a cloud vendor can have approach to your machines or data from inside; and that is the risk that you are taking at business.

This is also the reason why the main cloud vendors provide their customers with the choice to deal with their own encryption keys; more precisely, no one inside the vendor is able to have approach to the customers’ data even though they want to. Also, some cloud storage companies are now adopting a hybrid access, which can keep their more sensitive data inside a private cloud and other data as well as apps in the public cloud.

2. Why does someone still consider moving to the cloud even if it is really secure?

It is still an early period of cloud as less than 10 percent of the world’s data is estimated to be saved inside the cloud. One point to stick to your mind is that financial institutions have been hesitating to move forward to the cloud as there may be some holes in the model which can be risk averse. However, even this considerably cautious sector is stably starting to believing in it.

At the end of last year, United States bank Capital One claimed that it was decreasing the number of its own data centers from eight to only three by 2018 as well as transferring a lot of its processes and product improvement to AWS.

What is more, Tower Gate Insurance has recently informed that it was delivering its Information Technology infrastructure to the public cloud, too.

3. In which location all of this data is stored?

The main public cloud storage companies provide their clients with a lot of data centers. For instance, AWS is operating over 12 regions all over the world and storing thousands of copies of clients’ data. Thus, if one center is damaged or even destroyed in such disasters as earthquake, flood or storm, your data is still secure.

Nevertheless, what should be concerned is about data privacy, especially in Europe that follows the rescinding of the Safe Harbor data sharing agreement as well as the Edward Snowden leaks. In other words, cloud storage vendors now provide more and more options to host data in customers’ own regions.

Taking United States file storage and collaboration firm Box as an example, it has recently informed that it would be enhancing its data storage locations to new countries like Germany, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo as well, by piggybacking on current cloud infrastructures which are offered by IBM and AWS.

This is really necessary for such sectors as financial services and health care.

4. How can you opt for an ideal cloud vendor?

This depends much on what you would like it to do for you. There are some cloud storage companies that focus on certain fields. For example, Salesforce emphasizes on sales and customer data, while Workday concentrates on finance and human resources. and so on.