No, all you have is blind faith.
The cloud service provider will only guarantee what it can directly control and IT history tells us that's very little.
One could, and is near forced to blindly trust the provider - relying on your perceptions that it is an honourable company, that knows what it is doing and that it can be trusted to protect your data come what may. From a security point of view (not to mention matters of operational, privacy or compliance) the concept of blind faith has a difficult place in an organisation's business.
Keeping your servers and their data locked up in your own office or server room, with your own internet connection or two (which is wise), paying your own power bills, making sure your anti-virus and system security patches are up-to-date, making sure when employees leave they don't leave with the accounts or the master clients list, all mean you are the master of your own security and system availability.
If you don't trust yourself to do this properly, there is the option to offload these IT functions to a cloud service. Better is to get to know a trustworthy and proven IT solution provider but keep the data and it's dependencies under your lock and key.
Paul Appleby, Owner and Technical Director
This article was first published in Civil Society IT, Sept 2009
London Data is now offering a private cloud computing solution reaping the benefits of the cloud in a managed and controlled way.
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