Fear Not the Cloud: Part 3 - How Safe Is the Cloud?

One of the most common refrains we hear from clients - both longstanding and new - is that they’re hesitant to migrate their data to the cloud because they’re afraid it’s unsafe. We get it. Sending everything that makes your company tick into the ether can be a bit unnerving. But when done properly, keeping your organization’s data in the cloud is exponentially safer than keeping it on servers at your location and/or replicating it to a secondary data center.

The Cloud: A Simple Introduction

In order to understand how inherently secure the cloud is, you first need to understand how it works. We won’t get into the nitty-gritty of it here, but basically the cloud functions in much the same way the Internet does. It’s a conglomerate of computers all working together to store and transfer data. However, when you store data to the cloud - which you’re probably doing all the time without even realizing it - you aren’t sending your information to its own private cubby hole in space.

The cloud works by constantly transferring data across various computers in order to increase efficiency. If one machine was to go down, the entire operation would simply move over to another machine. By having multiple systems capable of completing the same work, at the same time, computers are able to run at close to full capacity, therefore ensuring their speed.

How Safe Is It?

So, if your data isn’t all headed to its own designated space - how could that possibly mean it’s safe? Well, you’ve heard the phrase “don’t put your eggs all in one basket,” right? That’s pretty much the idea here. With your data spread out, it’s a bit safer than if it were all clustered together the way it would be on physical servers in your location. Even if you have your data replicating to a data center across the state (which typically isn’t far enough away if you live on the East Coast since our states are fairly tiny) or across the country, your data is still - essentially - all in one place. Sure, there’s two copies of it. But two unfortunate incidents, or one determined hacker, can take it all out in one - okay, two - fell swoops.

It all goes much deeper than that, though.

Consider, for a second, who the main players in the public cloud storage game are. Microsoft. Amazon. Google. These aren’t mom and pop shops just figuring things out for the first time - these are the behemoths. This is what they do. When we hear about data breaches in the news, they’re never about data being hit in the public cloud - it’s typically information being stored on private networks that are getting attacked. These large public clouds are protected by more layers than we can really fathom. There’s passwords, and firewalls, and two-factor authentication, and replication, and more firewalls, and a few levels of encryption, and a few more firewalls - just for fun. They take their responsibility to keep the world’s data safe very seriously - and that’s a huge responsibility.

It’s been estimated that Google alone houses 10-15 exabytes of data in the cloud. One exabyte, for those of you who are wondering (because I certainly was!), is roughly 1 million terabytes - or 30 million personal computers worth of data. With Microsoft and Amazon getting in on the game, it’s safe to say there’s an insane amount of data in the cloud… and none of it has ever been breached the way private networks are.

If you’re ready to learn more about what the cloud can do for you, schedule your FREE IT assessment today.