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How Secure is Cloud Computing?

By Lori Olson

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 15Nov2009 Word count: 531 Viewed: 555 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

If you are an executive of a large company, one of your responsibilities is to make sure that all your employees are using the right software and hardware so they can do their jobs properly. It is not enough to buy just the hardware. You also need to buy software licenses so that your workers are equipped with all the proper tools. And when new employees come in, you have to make sure that the current software license lets the new user work. This task alone can be quite stressful. To make things easier, you must make use of cloud computing. But what exactly is cloud computing, and how can it help your company?

Cloud computing is a style of computing offered as a service over the internet that is often virtual and dynamically scalable. One of the most often used is email hosting. The best thing about it is that users are not required to learn the technological infrastructure that supports them. Cloud computing will take care of it all. Most applications cloud computing uses are business related such as an email server platform. Users can access them through a web browser. You may wonder why it is called cloud computing. Well, the term 'cloud' is actually used as a metaphor for the Internet and the idea is composed of a combination of platform, software, and infrastructure services. The actual software, however, are kept securely on the servers rather than on your computer.

The truth is you may have used some sort of cloud computing and may not even aware of it. You already have an experience with cloud computing if you have an email account with Hotmail, Yahoo mail, or Gmail - these are popular Web-based email services. What you do is to log-in to your email account remotely instead of running an email program on your PC. But is cloud computing really secure?

A lot of people admit that cloud computing is here to stay, and pretty soon millions and millions will be using it as well. Many companies are really worried about this due to the security concerns that come with jumping the firewall. Furthermore, how can you trust the cloud if you don't even know where exactly your data is being stored? The worst thing that could happen is when its systems are down, you are down as well. And if you did not purchase all those servers to run the application, there would be no local systems for back up.

But others are saying that there is nothing to worry about because the security of data in cloud computing is quite the same as with the data security at a remote data center. This means that data at the majority of companies actually has higher security risks in their own environment compared to a well-managed cloud.

The best thing to do is to teach your team about cloud computing. To learn more about the security implications of cloud computing, you can go to Cloud Security and other trustworthy online resources. To ensure data privacy, make sure that you always know where your data is stored and who has access to it and who doesn't.

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