Is My Data Safe In the Cloud?

One of the num­ber one ques­tions I get asked with regards to cloud com­put­ing is this, ​“Should I be con­cerned about secu­ri­ty issues when I’m using cloud com­put­ing for my busi­ness?” The answer is YES! But please keep read­ing before you write off cloud com­put­ing alto­geth­er. Trust­ed Companies Today we have a pletho­ra of cloud tech com­pa­nies to choose from for our busi­ness and mobile solu­tions. It seems like month­ly a new pro­gram or com­pa­ny sur­faces with some­thing ​“bet­ter.” My sug­ges­tion is to stick with trust­ed and sol­id com­pa­nies for your cloud ser­vices. A few exam­ples would be: Microsoft, Google, Intu­it, Drop­box, Apple, Ama­zon, Sales­force, to name a few. These are com­pa­nies with deep pock­ets and deal­ing with secu­ri­ty and your data is an impor­tant part of their busi­ness. Free Accounts vs Paid Then I get asked, ​“So what about going with a com­pa­ny that has free accounts, like Google Apps. Is that safe?” Google, to date, still makes over 95% of its rev­enue from paid search. They can afford to offer ​“free accounts.” Their goal is to not keep their cus­tomers on a free Google Apps account but to push them towards ongo­ing paid ser­vices: pre­mi­um accounts, Google Dri­ve, Google Check­out etc. There­fore, if you stick with the more estab­lished com­pa­nies who offer a free account, you are pret­ty safe. I saw ​“pret­ty safe” because I still would not store a lot of Finan­cial data in a free account. I’d instead get a secure and fee-based vault pro­gram. My favorite cloud-vault is: Keep­er. (About $30 a year) Bot­tom line, Make sure your cloud solu­tions have bank lev­el secu­ri­ty and are estab­lished com­pa­nies. Noth­ing in this life is com­plete­ly safe, cloud based or stored at your office. A fire can burn down your office. A bur­glar can steal your back­up dri­ve; an expe­ri­enced hack­er might be able to get into a cloud pro­gram! Don’t let this scare you to do noth­ing! I typ­i­cal­ly rec­om­mend hav­ing your data stored in at least two loca­tions. Con­sid­er an exter­nal hard dri­ve and using cloud stor­age! One last thing, on your mobile devices, make sure you have a way to ​“delete” your data if your phone is lost or stole. The iPhone makes this easy using ​“Find My iPhone.” Pho­to cour­tesy of: tech​nol​o​gy​.inc​.com