As this short article on ReadWriteWeb puts it: “It’s Hard to Steal A Cloud”. The US National Archives has lost some hard drives and would like them back. It’s important to remember a couple of things: a) lost != stolen and b) stolen usually == copied.
Sure the Cloud takes away the need for worrying about a lot of physical devices (physical security, transport, power, storage conditions etc). However it does place additional focus on Authorization to the Cloud Data. This set of apocryphal credentials are now the ‘keys to the kingdom’ – as opposed to root domain access and/or physical data center access. At lot of organizations as they move to the Cloud and going to have to get very serious about how they store and distribute these credentials.
It’s important for enterprises to look at the Cloud from an ‘emotionless’ position. The ridiculous superstition of ‘on premise is more secure’ needs to be replaced with more mature analysis of short, medium and long term threats (and cost modelling).
July 18, 2009 at 12:57 am
Hi Phil. Comments are turned off on your post “The Long Road Back To Apple” so I will comment here instead. I find it remarkable how similar our paths are – although my first “PC” was a Tandy TRS-80 Model III, my first serious efforts at development were on an Apple IIe. A superb piece of kit. Additionally, last December when the time came to buy myself a new laptop, after much analysis I bought a MacBook 13″ – motivated by a desire to have the best possible “socket” for my iPhone 3G. Although initially I had a *lot* of problems with the “don’t mention the war” issue of putting 4GB of memory into a October 2008-era MacBook 13″, pragmatism has prevailed and with 3GB and Windows 7 in a BootCamp-homed but VMWare Fusion-presented configuration, life is good. All of this is chronicled in more detail on my blog (website). Let’s get back in touch – would be good to catch-up both personally and professionally. Cheers
Duncan