It wasn’t that long ago that cloud storage was making quite the splash on the IT scene, and the fact that retaining files and data didn’t have to exclusively occur within hard drives was quite a revolutionary development. Right from day one, however, some people had concerns about the security of their information and other concerns related to a form of storage that wasn’t exclusively theirs. If it’s not my storage, they asked – then what’s to stop someone from reaching into that ‘cloud’ and helping themselves? The question’s fair enough, and in truth there’s been increasing concerns over pretty much every aspect of exchanging data over the Internet. A public survey down south in the States earlier this year revealed that 47% of people have cloud security concerns, and 80% of respondents support federal certification of cloud services. We can’t be certain if those same percentages would be reflected up here, but they likely would be. The next question, though, would quite naturally be – what would a web hosting or other related-service provider have to do, show, or prove to be federally (or nationally in our case) certified? Products and Services Fueling the Cloud Phenomenon There are all sorts of examples. Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s integrated cloud are two good ones of where extremely in-demand products are establishing the cloud as the norm for accessible data and services. Small and medium sized businesses are also coming around en masse to cloud hosting, and e-commerce is especially familiar with the cloud now too. So for as uniformly well-received as its been, the overall security of cloud computing is still a work in progress. But the key word there is progress. Progress is being made, and recently very much so. It’s a common belief that – because the cloud is so increasingly popular and yet still a remote ‘location’ for external storage – hackers will be particularly enthusiastic about seeing if they can get their way in and pillage the village. The extent to which that’s true is highly debatable, but fact is it’s increasingly important for web hosting companies offering cloud products to anticipate weaknesses in cloud security and...
