Yeah, the coffee may end up out there and not because we have a great moment to laugh about.
Most of us have seen bits and pieces of the news about the United States Government’s program called PRISM.
This article on Computer World is an excellent read on PRISM and the big Cloud vendor’s statements that they were oblivious.
Jonny Evans is bang on with his assessment on the big Cloud vendor’s denials place them in a very awkward position. Perhaps a better response would have been to wait things out a bit and then come clean with customers about government’s access to customer data.
We’ve all known about the possibility of governments accessing data with Cloud vendors being able to remain silent with their customers about that access.
The news about PRISM puts this reality in our faces and gives everyone a moment to have Cause for Pause.
For flat file data storage this situation presents an excellent opportunity for vendors of flat file encryption services that work on that data before it gets pushed up to the Cloud.
However, for things like hosted e-mail where raw content is sitting on the Cloud Vendor’s systems we know of no way to protect that data at all short of keeping in on-premises.
EDIT 2013-06-10: My fellow SMBKitchen author Susan Bradley has called me on my exclusion of the possibility of encrypted data hosted in Cloud based Exchange servers.
I do apologise for missing the fact that there _are_ vendors out there that can do just that.
CipherCloud is one such vendor that Susan mentioned.
So, off to their site we go and start a chat session to find out how much this service would cost us:
Holy Sugar Smacks!
Okay, so there are vendors out there that do this but at this time they are not very SMB friendly. :)
Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book
Chef de partie in the SMBKitchen
Find out more at
www.thirdtier.net/enterprise-solutions-for-small-business/
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