lustratus LiteBytes

Recently I have been involved in a discussion in the LinkedIn Integration Consortium group on managing data in a Cloud Computing environment, and the subject has turned to security.

I had maintained that data security concerns may sometimes result in companies preferring to look at some sort of internal Cloud model rather than risk putting their data in the Cloud-

the concept that I find is intriguing larger companies is the idea of running an INTERNAL cloud – this removes a lot of the concerns over data security, supplier longevity etc.

This generated a reaction from one of the other discussion participants, Tom Gibbs of DiCOM Grid.

I hate to poke at other commentators but security is an overarching issue for IT and telcom as a whole. No more and probably less of an issue with cloud or SaaS.

It’s almost amusing to watch legacy IT managers whine that b/c it isn’t local it isn’t secure. I’m sorry but this is totally naive.

This brings up an important point. What Tom is saying is that the Cloud provider will almost certainly offer top-notch security tools to protect data from unauthorized access or exposure, and therefore what’s the problem?

The answer is that the executive concern with putting data outside the corporate environment is likely to be more of an emotional rather than logical argument. With so many topical examples of confidential information being exposed, and executives knowing that regulations/legislation/corporate policies often make them PERSONALLY responsible for protecting information such as personal details of clients/customers/citizens, for example, the whole thing is just too scary.

IT folk may see this as naive, just as Tom says. After all, modern security tools are extremely powerful and rigorous. But of course this depends on the tools being properly applied. In the UK, for example, there have been a number of high-profile incidents of CDs or memory sticks containing confidential citizen information being left on trains and exposed to the media. The argument allowing data to be taken off-site was based around the fact that policy required all such data to be encrypted, making it useless if it fell into anyone else’s hands. These encryption algorithms were top-notch, and provide almost total protection. BUT the users who downloaded the information in each of these cases did not bother to encrypt it - in other words, if the procedures had been followed then there would have been no exposure but because people did not implement the procedures then the data was exposed.

These situations have not only proved extremely embarrassing to the data owners involved, but have resulted in heads rolling in a very public fashion. So the concerns of the executive moaning about risk are visceral rather than rational – ‘Moving my data outside of the corporate boundary introduces personal risk to me, and no matter how much the experts try to reassure me I don’t want to take that risk’. Of course less sensitive information will not be so much of a concern, and therefore these worries will not affect every Cloud project. But for some executives the ‘security’ concern with moving data into the Cloud, while not logically and analytically based, is undeniably real.

Steve