This situation has been amplified in recent weeks by Google’s Vint Cerf, who claims that the 21st century could become the second ‘dark ages’ due to the quantity of data being held digitally and the risk of it becoming obsolete for future generations. Ironically he suggests printing out treasured photographs before technology advances so fast that digital formats are no longer supported. There have been a proliferation of Cloud service offerings so it’s important that businesses and customers understand what to look for when choosing their own Cloud vendor. Customers need to think beyond data storage and data backup, to data security. What does your vendor do, to secure your data?

In the case of a data breach, you want to be sure as a customer that your vendor can effectively identify, and respond to any type of security threat and make sure that any resulting system downtime and data loss are kept to an absolute minimum. Your Cloud vendor must be able to evidence that they have the correct processes in place to ensure you meet your legal requirements with regard to data privacy.

It is vitally important that a cloud provider should make businesses aware of its processes and capabilities, including a definitive response time to respond to both an incident and informing the business of any issues; specific methods and mechanisms used to identify any emergency; the types of issues and emergencies the provider is equipped to handle; the duration of an emergency that the cloud vendor can sustain and how the cloud provider’s internal security practitioners will respond, react and communicate with each other to resolve an issue.

With business continuity management a legal requirement for many industries and best practice for all others, it’s important that customers make informed decisions when choosing a Cloud services provider.

About the Author