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ost of us at this point have heard the term ‘The Cloud’ bandied about and most of us would consider our knowledge of it as minimal at best, zero at worst. Outside of it being ‘something to do with the internet’, general knowledge is typically low.
What is cloud computing?
At its simplest level and according to techopedia.com, cloud computing is ‘the use of various services, such as software development platforms, servers, storage and software, over the internet, often referred to as the "cloud." In a nutshell this means you can have back-end hardware managed by a cloud vendor, you can pay for services rendered such as memory, bandwidth etc. and all services available to business are scalable, meaning you can ustilise ‘The Cloud’ as a small business or as a multi-national giant.
The huge benefit of this comes to smaller businesses. With the Cloud, there are resources available to you that were once only within reach of much larger organisations with much deeper pockets. Which makes cloud computing and technology absolutely worth exploring.
Is it safe?
Any data stored in the cloud is typically encrypted meaning any sensitive data like customer information is stored in a way that if accessed by the wrong people, will appear as garbled messaging with no obvious use. The ‘key’ to the encryption is more often than not, kept by the service provider. They will ‘unlock’ the encryption when users (i.e. you) need to access their data. This is super convenient and takes a lot of work off your hands. Its also less secure though. The tricky part here is if someone who has the knowledge to crack the code accesses your (i.e. your customer’s) information. As with anything controlled or designed by humans, there are flaws in systems and technology moves ahead in leaps and bounds leaving users scrambling to keep up and maintain security.
You can choose to encrypt and decrypt data yourself but it may take up a lot of your time and also requires a reasonably high level of technological prowess. Some cloud service providers allow you to do a bit of both – use their encryptions and then double-down by providing some of your own security gates.
Ultimately, cloud computing is a huge step forward and if you’re thorough in your investigation of service providers, do your research on the security-levels available and make sure you’re only working with tested & trusted cloud-based technology, you’re likely going to be okay and your & your customer’s data will be secure.
