Clouds So Secure, It's Spooky
Anyone who worries that the cloud is insecure has not been paying attention to the last few months of earthquakes in spook country. Any number of interested agencies would gladly have us all forget about the cloud, and return to the days when a lockpick, a camera and a kit full of wiretap tools could unearth our secrets at will.
Instead, modern crypto tools have placed the typical business communicator—lawful or otherwise—on a plane of secure communication once reserved for national governments. In the words of a now-ancient telco TV ad, "Is the network secure?" "Fort Knox should be this secure."
I'm not just talking about the security algorithms in BlackBerry handhelds, although these have been very much in the spotlight of late; I'm also talking in broader terms about the whole portfolio of publicly available protections, like the off-the-shelf encryptions on a banker's files in Brazil that have so far resisted seventeen months of scrutiny by Brazilian officials and the United States' FBI.
What's odd, it seems to me, is the gap between what people say about security and what they actually do. I often get questions from people about the security of their data in a salesforce.com cloud: ironically, many of those questions arrive via unencrypted email. Which do you think would be the more attractive target for someone attacking your organization: your customer contact list (including all your dormant and low-value customers) that's rigorously secured in a Sales Cloud 2 database, or your last several weeks of urgent but unencrypted email discussions with your sales team? Which offers the prospect of richer return for less effort?
The more of your business you do with Force.com workflows or in Chatter groups, instead of sending emails and attaching documents and spreadsheets, the more you're able to say about what happened when – and about who, precisely, was allowed to know about it. Adopt the cloud – and scare a spook today.
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