The ever increasing uptake of cloud storage services as expected, has seen a decrease in what is called traditional data loss incidents, which includes hard disk failures. There are now however, increasing concerns over security, especially as many of the services being used, store the data on public servers.
As such the data is still stored in an area which should only be accessible to the individual or employees of the company. With upwards of 80% of enterprise level companies expected to be using these services within the next year, data security has come under scrutiny, as most companies are now holding large quantities of confidential data subject to the data protection act.
While using cloud storage places the responsibility and general data security onto the service provider, it makes it much more difficult for a company to know the exact status of their files at any one time. Most cloud services allow the sharing of files, either with colleagues, clients or even the public. It is all too easy for a confidential file to become accessible, either malicious intent or an innocent mistake.
While proper training and security checks on files being made available publically should eliminate these problems, other considerations need to be taken into account. If you company is creating huge quantities of data, which must be available instantly when required, the speed of your connection to the cloud provider may be an issue.
We have undertaken a number of jobs, where data has been backed up using a cloud service, but it has been a lot faster to recover the data from the on-site server, rather than wait for the data to be transferred back from the cloud. Once you have large quantities of data, it is essential to test your disaster recovery strategy in advance of it being required.
