The cloud - The bringer of rain and the leveler of competition

The cloud is helping smaller companies take on the bigger, established tech giants. Where there were around eight tech companies ruling the world with their respective offerings, there are four now. A recent post on Wired compared some of the giants to zombies! Techocalypse on the way? IBM, Cisco, HP, Dell and Oracle are losing market share in the IT world bit by bit.

There are a gazillion startups who specialize in one or two niche offerings with Software as a Service. If you are a new business, you do not need to setup nor maintain your own datacenter. You don't have to go to the zombies anymore. Cloud your services and solutions with minimal hardware costs.

The point of mentioning this is not to indicate the death of behemoths, but rather, to shed light on the possibilities that smaller businesses finally have, to achieve operational efficiencies which were almost always exclusive to big companies with the sheer amount of investment involved.

Amazon, Google, and now Microsoft have really upped their game, enabling server level functionalities to hordes of customers who just pay for what they use and scale their needs according to requirements. There is no maintenance nor ongoing cost to bear for the company. With Infrastructure as a Service, anyone can gain access to virtual machines and carry out numerous functions. The need for enterprise-grade hardware is being replaced by enterprise-grade software.

The black cloud overhead

The security issue is one of the key concerns. Celebgate, Ashley Madison, TalkTalk, Sony Pictures and many more have been in the news for that exact reason. All these hacks have different purposes, but they come peppered with serious ramifications. Celebgate was directed at iCloud users. Phishing and brute force guessing got the better of more than a hundred individuals, most notably celebrities.

The Ashley Madison hackers socially incarcerated people who signed up to have extra marital affairs. Regardless of why-the-hack-happened, the how-it-happened needs deliberation. There were serious lapses with Ashley Madison, like no verification for email addresses at the parent company’s end, and shockingly easy passwords at the user end. The combination of all these factors lead to one of the most controversial data leaks in recent years, from a website where users were promised that their information was safe.

TalkTalk’s failure to encrypt and secure data led to the biggest breach of the year with four million customers losing sensitive information which, in some cases, had been used to scam users via phone calls. It is too late to say in hindsight that it could have been avoided, but it could have been avoided. At Sony Pictures, the hack was supposedly going on for almost a year. Sony lost nearly 100 terabytes of data. The implications were grave. From unreleased movies to scripts, to emails to invoices, the hackers made all that data public.

There is a silver lining

The good news is that cloud providers are constantly working on security. But there are steps you have to take to ensure there are no breaches at your end. Conventional practices constantly need to be updated to keep up with the pace of innovation. This includes system security as well as personnel behavior. There is no point in having all the security in place if one person has a lapse in judgment or concentration. Identity and accountability are imperative followed by technological aid. That's a good way to keep security in check. If someone gets hold of information they shouldn't, alarm bells should ring.

IT companies and security consultants can help you design a cloud system with various options - public, private or hybrid. Businesses should look at the company's accreditations before giving them any kind of access to any sort of data. Always ask where the data is going to be stored, how will it be transmitted and what strategies they have in place in case of a breach.

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At the consumer end, the responsibility of safeguarding data falls on the user. They have to realize the safety standards that are being used. A mere "trusted security" badge with an icon of a shield is not good enough. The Internet has numerous protocols and standards, and as we propel ourselves towards the next digital age, users will have to keep up with the innovations and be aware of the standards and practices.

Despite these issues surrounding cloud computing, it is the future that is already here. We cannot let security undermine the limitless possibilities that cloud computing offers. It is time to realize that the cloud can level a lot of competition. Go on, make it rain!