One of the primary issues stated by business people when thinking about moving information and processes to “the Cloud” is risk. Understandably, business people are wary of outsourcing confidential data and express concerns regarding the security of their information. If you’re concerned about information and document security, consider using a virtual data room or highly secure extranet.
Another concern involves the sense of lack of control over company data and the inability to monitor the software processes used to organize the information.
Fortunately, new products are appearing that alleviate these common concerns. A couple of ideas of note are cloud monitoring services and cyber-risk insurance.
Cyber-risk insurance typically covers damages which arise from failures due to your use of online or internet-based technologies. For example, this type of policy can cover data loss, service outages resulting from server downtime, or hardware or software failures. According to this article, nearly 29% of U.S. companies use cyber-risk insurance. Of course, cyber-risk insurance does little to protect the confidentiality of your client’s data, but it does provide your business with coverage should a data loss occur.
Another way to handle risk in the Cloud is to carefully monitor the services provided by cloud computing vendor. This can be managed by using cloud management software. As explained in this Enstratus blog post*, cloud monitoring services can:
- Make the underlying cloud easier to use
- Extend security policies into the cloud environment
- Protect from single cloud vendor lock-in to allow cross cloud operations and migration
- Manage to your service level requirements
- Accommodate for financial controls and tracking
- Allow auditing and compliance reporting
Of course, depending on the type of your business and your specific needs, using these types of services may not be practical. However, it’s useful to become familiar yourself with these offerings so that you can stay on top of the different options that are available. Doing so will allow you to better assess new services that may be more suitable to your needs.
And, it’s certainly reassuring to know that innovative companies are addressing the concerns raised by many business owners. Indeed, this trend is simply further proof that, over time, the complex ethical and security issues that cloud computing presents will be resolved and cloud services will become all the more acceptable to all businesses, large and small alike.
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* Enstratus Post: http://enstratus.typepad.com/blog/2010/06/what-is-cloud-management-and-why-does-it-matter.html
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