A Day of (digital) Freedom...

As the nation celebrates its successful fight for liberty on this fourth of July, it's fascinating to note how many liberties we've willfully given up these last ten years and how that impacts security for both cloud storage and data transmission.  One of the major factors individuals and companies cite as their reason for refusing cloud based technologies is security; they stress the need to ensure privacy and corporate governance that can be better achieved if the information is on premise.

http://edgestrategies.com/component/k2/item/117-just-released-2012-microsoft-edge-technologies-smb-cloud-adoption-study.html

While this logic may seem sound and provide a sense of comfort, this is simply not the case.  As more information comes to light about the NSA activities and Google's own admissions about data mining, the idea that shared information is safe just because it's behind your firewall is an illusion.  In fact, leading edge cloud storage providers can actually offer greater protection of your data than private enterprises for a fraction of the cost, monitored around the clock and with better ease of use to both the client and their customers. For example, an exploit from the inside the corporate environment makes the firewall moot.  Having an outsourced partner that is more focused in the area of security, and that is also less susceptible to internal exploits (i.e. via employees, infected end-users, etc.) is actually safer than the notion of doing it “in-house”.  Just because one has physical “control”, doesn’t mean the infrastructure is safer.  

Creating truly secure environments, you see, is the ultimate dilemma - by making something more secure, you're simultaneously making that piece of information more difficult to access for the others that need it.  The ability to quickly service and respond to a client usually trumps the need for privacy.  We see that more and more as people start to employ popular applications like Dropbox and Evernote.  In this high security world we worry too much about guarding information from imagined threats and not enough about sharing it properly, securely and effectively.  Cywest Communications understands this and we're developing solutions that address the customer's need for security and ease of use specifically.  As Thomas Jefferson said, "I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty, than those attending too small a degree of it."