Where Should You Host Your Confidential Business Information? In-House or Cloud
Whether to host sensitive business information on local servers or externally through the cloud is a question that continues to weigh heavily on most Chief Technology Officers. While the advanced technological developments with the cloud services continue to change, introducing a host of benefits to different business models, this advancement hasn’t wholly dispelled security threats to business information. However, is this only fear preventing most business executives from embracing cloud technology?
Major concerns among business owners about cloud technology
According to an article posted on Info Security, apart from security breaches especially from unauthorized external access to sensitive company information in the cloud databases, most managers also fear losing control. They tend to feel more comfortable by having their company files and employee information under one roof, lock and key as well as in the care of security strategists they can control.
However a deeper understanding of how data protection reveals that this control does not necessarily translate to better security. Far from the physical security aspect of data protection, there exist several other approaches to data security protection measures that both companies and cloud storage hosts need to understand.
What does data security entail?
From the most recent and major global data breaches, you can tell that the biggest threat to data compromise does not necessarily occur through physical data loss but from unauthorized access. Therefore, business executives should be more concerned about over the internet security measures than losing physical control of the company data. Information security, thus, entails coming up with dependable data loss protection strategies like backups, encryption, anti-malware, and DDoS protection protocols as well as executing reliable access controls.
Additionally, the fact that advancement in technology gives rise to new threats makes data protection an on-going project. For adequate data protection, you need well qualified and experienced information security engineers on standby. In effect, if you seek to maintain company information in-house securely, you must invest heavily in infrastructure and information engineering personnel.
In-house or cloud maintenance?
The bottom line to this dilemma is that none of the two approaches to data storage is completely secure as they are both subjected to similar cyber threats. However, the cloud storage service providers not only have better infrastructure but also have more experienced and adequate workforce to handle such threats. Additionally, storage of company information over the cloud helps improve your company’s productivity as some of the resources in terms of infrastructure and manpower. In most cases, you might even save on your operational costs as the business spends less on cloud storage service than it would when maintaining an in-house data center.
