The internet is awash with this weekend’s hacking of numerous celebrity photos from Apple’s cloud service, the iCloud. This led to an even greater reluctance among the corporate crowd – including those at the executive level – to use cloud storage as an efficient means of data storage.
How Afraid are People?
According to Explore B2B:
“Contrary to what many might believe today, cloud computing is in fact still not adopted as readily today. One of the main reasons being Security, and understandably so. The RSA Conference held in San Francisco this year saw the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) introducing the top 9 threats to Cloud Computing in 2013 named “The Notorious Nine”, which had Data Breaches as number One on the list.
A survey conducted by IDG Enterprise for Cloud Research 2013 shows that 49 percent of executive-level managers are still skeptical to move on to the cloud due to various reasons, the top 3 reasons being Security, Losing Control and Data Protection. Cloud Security concern is not surprising considering the security breaches that has affected many mid and large scale companies.”
This, doubled with headline news on cloud security breaches, means that IT security firms face a formidable task in persuading many corporate firms to switch to a cloud system.
Cloud computing should not be something that businesses should be afraid of. With adequate safety measures, it is a system that can advance a business to the next level. IT security firms should guide their clients to see the opportunities in cloud computing. While cloud storage does pose its set of risks – like all data storage methods – these can be mitigated by secure encryption systems. Executives should not be afraid of cloud computing, provided that they are completing necessary steps to keep their data protection services up to date.
