Cloud services can solve many security challenges of today's SMBs and SMEs, and at a fraction of the cost. For example, wouldn't the small to midsize business be better protected if its data and operation were housed in a major data center vs. a spare back office or telco closet? And wouldn't the costs to match the level of security, redundancy, and availability promised by cloud services providers be prohibitive to these firms.
If you can touch the servers, does that make your operation more secure or not? For small to medium size business, I’d say not. And so suggests a new survey of data breaches, sponsored by Compuware and performed by privacy research organization Ponemon Institute, gathering information from over 1000 IT professionals around the world. Excerpts follow:
- 80% of companies admitted to data breach;
- 43% had experienced two or more breaches in the past twenty-four months.
- 75% have suffered breaches as a result of employee accident or error.
- 26% have experienced breaches as a result of employee malice.
- 34% didn't know how many breaches their company had suffered.
Only 1% of breaches came from outside the company. So if you subscribe to these statistics, and you get your ERP or CRM services as SaaS by a cloud provider, you could almost eliminate the threat of a data breach by a company insider. Possible? Maybe so.
Of course, you're not eliminating risk, but transferring it to another entity for a price.
