The concept of cloud computing as a platform for distributed computing traces its roots back to 1993. There have been many promises and claims that this technology will bring vast benefits to the companies that choose to adopt it. Has this been the case? I have to say a resounding maybe to this question. The benefits seem nice. You can use the same datastore easily from many places with this technology. You don’t need as much data storage space on premise as before.
But what are the dangers? As we have seen banks fail in the past, what if these companies who hold our data fail? What if the Internet becomes overloaded or the network that the data travels on becomes corrupt. What about the security of your data itself?
As soon as you sign off on the contract and transfer your data to the cloud data bank, it is very similar to depositing your money in a bank. We have seen bank failures in the past, so what if your data bank fails? What if the very processes that your company runs on are suddenly no longer available to access by you? What if a ‘bad actor’ acquires administrator level access to your data and steals your company intellectual property?
I believe that every company should maintain full control and security of their data by keeping their data physically under their control. You can still benefit from the cloud technology through simple tools like OwnCloud and Nextcloud, but simply keep the servers on-premise under your own lock and key.
I do use One Drive with my Microsoft 365 subscription. However I don’t keep sensitive data there and I use a Buffalo TeraStation to keep a local backup of it continually.
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