Security in cloud - You can't touch. You can't feel. Do you trust?

I admit it is scary. As a businessman you spend months and years building up your business. You nurture customer relationships like family relationships. They trust you in turn - with confidential information about yourself. You have their phone numbers, email addresses, address, bank account information - all stored in your database. If you are using a cloud service, this means "your database" sits up there in cloud with the servers of your service provider. What if someone stole that data? The lifeline of your business does not seem to be in your hand. Very scary.

However, that is exactly the direction software industry is moving. GMail, Facebook, Office360 and Zoho are all cloud applications. We are getting used to not having any data on the hard drivers of our computers. Thousands of terabytes of sensitive data is stored in cloud today. In spite of that, the security breaches we hear are less from the cloud service providers and more from the viruses on the personal computers of the individuals. It is ironic. Cloud service providers have done a better job at protecting our data then we could do ourselves.

There is a reason for the super-performance of Cloud service providers. They have to solve the problem of security once and then spread the benefit over millions of users using their service. Thus they can spend a lot more on security. GMail and Zoho have dedicated team of dozens of intrusion detection, network security and data reliability experts guarding your data from hackers on the internet. They are also incredibly sensitive about guarding your data. Their business depends on your continued trust. They end up doing a great job. On the contrary, you would hardly have time to backup your hard disks on regular basis. You would find it difficult to disallow employees to carry USB drivers in the company.

No wonder security of Cloud trumps security on the ground. The computing world will continue its march towards Cloud. The tech savvy organizations have already done that and today the less tech-savvy companies are following the march too.