What is the Cloud?

We often hear terms like “Wi-Fi” and “the Cloud” and these terms can make the internet sound like an abstract concept. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality The Cloud is a series of hot, noisy servers, housed in faceless buildings, linked together by thousands of miles of wires running through tubes buried under ground.

The data centres that we hear people talking about when referring to “The Cloud” are more like the brain of the internet, and they are scattered across the world. These are made up by a collection of servers and when people refer to storing data on the cloud what is really meant is storing data securely on the hard drives of these servers.

So where does your data really go?

When you put your data into the cloud you are often handing it to a reseller, who has a business relationship with a data centre is not necessarily in the same locations the company. Although the reseller is local, you may be giving your data to a provider to store in a different county or continent.

We all know the many business benefits of Cloud computing and the increased flexibility achieved by a workforce by being able to access the information from anywhere at any time. The downside; however of this is that you never know exactly where your data will be stored.

This is extremely important when thinking about recovery of your data. If there is a disaster in your business and all data is lost will you be able to contact your provider for a hard copy? How long will it take before you can re access your data and get your business operating again.

The impacts of where the data is being stored further impacts sectors such as the legal and financial services. EU Data Protection laws state that personal data must be held and stored in facilities that are in a country recorded on the European Commission list of places that provide accurate protection for personal data.

Before moving information to the cloud you should assess the nature of your data and its level of sensitivity. If you are an organisation dealing with customer s sensitive data would the customer perceive it to be appropriate for such information to be stored on the cloud?

Would your cloud vendors security meet the European Law requirements or in simple terms is it ISO 27001 certified? Do you know in what Data Centre your data will be stored and will the vendor be able to provide backups, disaster recovery and business continuity procedures?

In short – can your cloud provider show you your data?