Security in the Cloud

Customers are sometimes apprehensive about moving to Cloud Computing, and they often express this hesitation as being “concerned about security” or “worried about data privacy”.  Oddly enough, if you ask, most of them will also to tell you how great online banking is and how they couldn’t live without it.

They might also mention how many laptops have been stolen or lost in the last year.  Let’s face facts; people who want your data would rather steal the laptop of a Product Manager or Sales Director to have all of the contacts, emails, and documents locally than spend all the time and effort to hack firewalls, crack passwords and then cover their tracks.  Does your company have encrypted PSTs or My Documents folders on laptops?

Now let’s contrast this situation with Cloud based email at Google.  If my laptop is stolen, the thief gets nothing.  There’s no data stored locally on my machine.  Google even takes things a few steps further to ensure security and privacy.  

At the bottom of every Google Mail page, you will notice a button called “Activity”.  If you click on it, it displays not only the address of all the recent connections to your mail but also the method (imap, browser, etc…).  Even more, with Google Apps, you can automatically enforce SSL encryption at the domain level.   

Need more security?  How about the fact that Google Apps includes Postini Message Security and Discovery at no additional cost.  This includes spam control, anti-virus protection, and message filtering.  Need still more?  With Google’s support for Single-Sign-On, we can implement multi-factor authentication which means that even if a password is compromised, additional private information is required to access the account.  

In reality, Cloud computing provides better security in a quicker and efficient way.  If you too have “security concerns”, we would love to talk with about how to improve your controls, while reducing costs.  To set up a demo or just get started with a trial deployment, contact Eran at 404-665-3132 or email sales@cloudsherpas.com.