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There’s still a lot of discussion about security in the cloud, how secure your data is, and more.  And I’m sure that discussion will continue for months to come.  But it’s important to look at the issue in perspective.  How many of the cloud security nay-sayers are really applying the same standards to their own systems, servers and data centres?

As this article on the US portal ComputerWorld points out, cloud applications are subject to far fewer threats than data sitting within the average company’s building. 

Is there easy physical access to the cloud?  No:  cloud hosting is done in massive data centres with multiple perimeter check points to restrict access.  Are there thousands of services running on the network with little visibility into what they are?  No.  Are there rogue access points?  No – firewalling and network perimeter defences are airtight.  The risk of disgruntled employees?  There is maybe a small risk, but far less than in any ordinary company. 

Not to mention the fact that cloud apps have resilience and multiple failovers, and don’t lose your data in the event of a crash.  Compared with these points, the average company has a long way to go to match cloud security.

When one the world’s biggest cloud applications has an outage, it immediately draws comment about whether the cloud model can truly support business.

This was certainly the case yesterday when Google’s Gmail service fell over following some routine software maintenance.  This left many of the service’s 113 million business and personal users without access to their accounts for about 3 hours while engineers fixed the problem, as detailed here.

But when you think about it, the outage also showed how robust cloud applications can be.  Look at those figures again:  a service with over 100 million users fails, then is restored in under three hours.

Yes, it’s inconvenient for users during that time.  But how many times a month or year does conventional business software crash?  For how long?  And at what cost of repair? 

As the article above points out, business Gmail users have uptime guarantees – so are likely to be compensated for the inconvenience.  Which is something that users of conventional users wouldn’t get from a software vendor.

In my view, the outage says more about how resilient cloud apps can be in the event of a problem.

At analyst IDC’s recent Cloud Computing Forum in San Francisco, a survey of attendees showed that security is the number-one concern for IT managers when they think about cloud application deployments, followed by performance, availability, and the ability to integrate cloud services with in-house IT.

At face value, that makes perfect sense. But as this article from the UK news portal TechWorld points out, companies need to be realistic about the level of security they achieve inside their own business, and how that compares to the security available in the cloud.

As it says, how many companies can truly say their data on servers within the office is secure? How is it protected, and is it as robustly protected as it would be in the cloud?

It’s always worth asking a cloud service provider what security they offer. But just because it’s not in the server cabinet in the IT room doesn’t mean it’s vulnerable.

John Cummins, sales and marketing consultant
www.bestquarter.com