New Perils in a Connected World – by Stew Nelson

A recent New York Times editorial “The Cloud Darkens” posited that recent well publicized data breaches by hackers has caused some corporate technology professional to “get cold feet” and suggest IT managers question the wisdom of moving sensitive information to the cloud where it exposes “them to devastating identity theft and fraud.” I would hope that corporations would have the exact opposite reaction to the hackings and accelerate their migration to the cloud so that technology professionals at the data centers can help secure their data in virtual servers using state of the art encryption and firewalls. No business is safe from hackers as Apple learned this weekend and most high profile attacks have not even involved true Cloud Computing.

Well run data centers can secure information better than most corporations can with state of the art firewalls and network scanners (intrusion alert systems), strict access control and the ability to easily encrypt data.

If you and your business are considering moving to the cloud, do not delay your move - just make sure that you choose the right data center. I won’t go into what makes the best data center but there is a wealth of information available on the net. One thing I should mention is that every company should have a policy for how long they store sensitive Personal Information. Much of the data stolen in the Sony attack and presumably other attacks was not even current. If it is not current, dump it! Also, don’t forget that data breach insurance should be a cornerstone of your risk management program for data integrity.