Cloud Computing: Playing it safe

As operations manager with commercial fit-out and refurbishment firm Intrec Management, Dennis Wong was looking for ways to minimise the effort it took to run three offices with 30 staff across three states. Like many small businesses, managing Intrec’s information technology had become costly and time consuming.

As the company came to rely on a customer database and email access, Wong struggled to ensure that servers holding the relevant data were online and accessible and found weekends and holidays were constantly interrupted with the need to fix computer infrastructure.

He also lacked the skills and resources to ensure the system was safe from hackers and that the data it contained was backed up in a secure location.

“I was looking for a stable, safe, reliable platform that would actually increase the level of security to which we have access,” Wong says. “We were like most SMEs – we had little IT budget and security, if anything, was an afterthought.”

Wong was faced with a seemingly impossible decision: find a way to clone himself – increasing the IT budget by a factor of 10 – or become an early adopter of Telstra’s business productivity online service in which company data and software applications are stored remotely in Telstra’s data centres.

“A lot of professionals are sensitive about having their corporate data in the cloud because there’s a sense you lose control of it and you don’t know where it is,” Wong says. “But the reality is that most companies don’t have the skills or resources to keep their data safe in their own offices and it’s safer in the cloud.

“The key is vendor selection. You pick a reputable technology vendor and the security you get in the cloud is better than most businesses could provide for themselves.”

The cost of unstable and insecure information technology systems is also often underestimated by SMEs. The Ponemon Institute assessed the cost associated with 16 different data-loss incidents in Australia and found that the average cost to each company was $1.97 million, or $123 per record. About half of the incidents were the result of targeted hacking attacks; the rest had been caused by accidents or technology failures.

The Internet Security Threat Report, by web security company Symantec, says 60 per cent of data breaches are caused by hacking, while issues such as poor password protection account for 35 per cent.

Nick McMenemy, head of marketing and product management for technology services provider Brennan IT, says many businesses have little insight into information technology security – they believe their data is safe simply because it is in a computer on their own premises. Cloud computing, he says, gives small businesses access to a level of security they would not otherwise be able to afford or implement effectively.

The principal security concern for those contemplating cloud computing is that their data will be hosted on servers together with that of other companies but McMenemy says these concerns usually can be overcome by the creation of a private cloud, which provides the flexibility of cloud computing with the reassurance that data will be contained on a specific set of servers.

“Cloud computing is proven technology, it’s also cheaper and more secure than most of the alternatives. But some people still want know exactly where their data is located,” he says.

“One of the big advantages of cloud computing,” Wong says, “is that it gives a much higher level of security than we had previously. It means the provider has borne the cost of implementing a comprehensive security solution beyond anything I could have done alone.”

BRW

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