Businesses are turning away from storing their critical data
in the cloud, due to concerns over security, government
regulations, and the risks of doing business with cloud
start-ups.
Although cloud storage is cheaper than in-house storage, and
made sense for some applications, overall it posed too great a
risk, said a panel of IT professionals at Storage Expo.
Shikoh Khan, storage platform manager at Transport for London,
said he was not convinced that cloud-based storage was safe yet. As
a public service organisation, TfL needed to ensure its security
could not be compromised, he said.
Dave Harding, head of technology at the British Board of Film
Classification, said, "I wouldn't want to put my data in Google. I
would prefer to store it in a bank, which already has a lot of my
personal information."
A government delegate said that a significant amount of
government data cannot be stored in the cloud for regulatory
reasons. "We need to comply with ISO 27001, so we need similar
guarantees from cloud providers."
Steve O'Donnell, managing director at analyst ESG, said that
although cloud storage offers "pretty strong value" for supporting
regulatory compliance, it a risk too far. Many of the start-ups
offering cloud services today would be unlikely to succeed, he
said.
Graeme Hackland, head of IS at Renault F1, said, "With 40% of
our workforce mobile, it would make sense to put some data in
cloud, but my biggest concern about cloud storage is data
security."
Hackland said culturally IT directors preferred to know that the
data was stored in their own datacentres. "I can walk into a
datacentre and see my data," he said.
But the situation is changing thanks to companies such as Oracle
and Salesforce.com, which offer software as service, and store
application data in the cloud.
O'Donnell questioned whether users would want to store data at
Amazon, Google or Microsoft. But global system integrators, which
already store vast amounts of enterprise data, would be in a good
position to provide cloud storage services.
Hackland said that businesses will begin to see the benefit of
cloud storage by using SaaS e-mail services to store users' inboxes
and to provide e-mail archiving.
O'Donnell said users trust SaaS providers. "Our view is that if
you are just storing raw data, you have responsibility for it, but
if a company buys SaaS, the provider is responsible."