Cloud computing

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That's a good point and I'll give you another example. I recently implemented Offsite backups. It SaaS and everything that I backup is encrypted with AES 256 bit. Now I am the only one who posses the encryption key so if the company I use needs to access my data they would not be able to do this because they don't have access to my encryption key... in other words if I lose that encryption key, my data is as good as gone. That same company that we use to do our offsite backs also hosts backups for banks and other financial institutions. Now you can imagine the level of security and trust these institutions must maintain to obtain all the industry standard certificates and accreditations and the tests they must pass constantly. In fact in some cases it might even be more secure than our network.

The only reason why people are skeptical about the cloud is like you said, they don't know where the data is and where it's managed. But at some point in the future I am pretty positive this will become more mainstream than what it already is. Sure having all your data in HQ office that you can access or have the ability to limit access to others gives you a piece of mind, but by no means is your network more secure than lets say a cloud is.

 

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Yes, I would - and did. With a colo facility, the data is still stored on YOUR servers that only you have access to. The only access they'd have to the data is the same access they'd have to the data if they were to sniff it as it goes across a point-to-point WAN connection between remote sites. This, to me, is an acceptable level of risk.

Doesn't matter whether they hold the key or not... the data is stored on servers that is not mine, and passes through any number of company's equipment before it reaches me. This might be an acceptable level of risk to some people, but it is not to me... especially when there are other (private/local) alternatives available.

You are correct: it comes down to a level of trust.

 

I followed this discussion with some interest. It occurred to me whilst reading through it though that millions of companies all across the world daily entrust their business to the cloud, because they operate a business via the web that is hosted by a web hosting company. Thus for example the company's database is accessible to web host technical support staff, and the company's image and reputation depends on the reliability of the web service provided, for example for the security of the confidential information that customers entrust to them (eg. credit card/banking details).

Even if the company has a dedicated server as opposed to sharing hosting with other customers, they will often have a managed hosting plan, and not ever see their own servers. They want to concentrate on their business and leave the updating and maintaining of a web server to someone else. They are primarily concerned with having the required bandwidth and storage space, and security is something like that which we have with our bank, ie. it is someone whom we trust, such as a well-known brand name.

I think going into the future it is simply not realistic to be too distrustful of the cloud, because the fact is we are already relying on it much more than maybe we even realise.

One aside I noticed recently was that in the Google Chrome browser there's no option to turn off the Automatic Updates. What that means is that every time you run it you are getting the latest most up to date version. Just imagine if that were the norm - then the 40% or so of web users in the world who are using the buggy non standards-compliant IE6/7 browsers would be running IE8 instead - they just simply could not run IE6/7 even if they wanted to. At first I found this forced auto-update an odd concept, but after thinking about it, its logical isn't it? Chrome is a cloud service and it makes sense they provide the latest version to you at all times. If your system can't support the update the updater can simply detect that and not update it.

There are many people out there who don't know why their web browsing experience is so troublesome, and it is because they are still running an out-of-date browser such as IE6. With the cloud these users wouldn't be having these problems.

I just wrote a little JavaScript utility, a 'bookmarklet', and realised that to provide it to people I'm placing it in the cloud. It seems a natural way to do things.

 

This is a timely reminder about putting your data in other people's hands.

Long story short, ISP in NZ had an email server failure, end result 266 email accounts deleted. The ISP is trying to recover, but no backup.

http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/email-files-gone-good-3864874