Security and data protection in the cloud

16.10.2011 With the recent high-profile security breaches of Sony's PlayStation Network, along with outages at Amazon's data centres, LAURA O'BRIEN asks providers how secure data is in the...

With the recent high-profile security breaches of Sony's PlayStation Network, along with outages at Amazon's data centres, LAURA O'BRIEN asks providers how secure data is in the cloud.

In April of this year, Sony experienced one of the biggest security breaches of all time. The Sony PlayStation Network and Qriocity Services were infiltrated, giving hackers access to personal information from 77m accounts. Its PC Games Network followed, which affected 24.3m users.

With these high-profile events, it’s no wonder that 68pc of Irish companies who took part in an O2 cloud computing survey cited data security as their biggest barriers to moving to the cloud. Nevertheless is this fear valid?

O’Haire goes on to say that, if anything, cloud computing offers much stronger security options for smaller companies than non-cloud solutions.

“The first thing to do is acknowledge that for some businesses – undoubtedly the small to medium businesses – the type of security available in the cloud is much, much greater than they could potentially ever afford themselves.

The economies of scale

“It’s about the economies of scale. A small or medium business may only be able to afford a certain class of firewall, or intrusion prevention or other types of security and probably doesn’t have a guard at the door 24/7 to make sure that nobody walks in and takes their data.”

However, Duncan emphasises that Interxion doesn’t get involved in the virtual side of data security and says that it is up to businesses to look to the security experts for this.