PCWORLD:
The Cloud's Dark Side
The biggest misgiving that most businesses have about the cloud involves security, according to two recent surveys.
In a December 2009 Forrester Research survey, 51 percent of SMB participants said that security and privacy concerns were their top reasons for not using cloud services.
Similarly, respondents to an IDC survey in late 2009 said that their biggest worries about cloud computing were, in descending order, security, availability, and performance.
It's not difficult to find instances of security breaches in cloud computing, of course. On the other hand, you can't entirely eliminate risk from any computing environment. Intruders may hack into files stored on your business's own servers or hard drives. Hard drives may fail. Unencrypted information stored on laptops may lead to identity theft or lawsuits when the laptops go missing.
Cloud computing security lapses are "like airplane disasters," says Rosenfeld. "Trillions of transactions happen without any problem every day. You only hear about it when something goes wrong." Rosenfeld adds, "I know enough both to worry about [cloud computing] security and to not give it too much thought."
Here are some other commonly cited concerns about cloud computing:
• Privacy: How much data are cloud companies like Google collecting about you, and how might that information be used?
• Availability: Will your cloud service go down unexpectedly, leaving you without access to critical customer records, e-mail, or other information for hours or more? Gmail outages are widely reported, but Salesforce.com and other well-established services have gone dark on occasion, too.
• Data loss: Some online storage sites have shut down abruptly, sending users scrambling to recover their data, sometimes with only 24 hours' notice. And T-Mobile Sidekick users were unhappy to discover that their personal data had been erased from their devices--especially when Microsoft said that the data loss was irrevocable. (A few days later, Microsoft announced that it had recovered most of the data.)
• Data mobility and ownership: Will you be able to share data between different cloud services? If you decide to stop using a cloud service, can you get all of your data back? What format will it be in? How can you be certain that the cloud service will destroy all of your data once you've severed ties with it?
• Tool robustness: Cloud-based tools frequently aren't as powerful as software applications. Google Docs, for instance, lacks a number of features that Microsoft Office has had for years, such as the ability to track changes in a text file. [link]
posted by: gqjournal
Comments