Balancing Risk and Reward With Cloud Computing

Grazed from BusinessNews Daily. Author: Greg Grocholski.

Cloud computing has caught on with companies of every size, but it’s especially appealing to resource-strapped small businesses and start-ups. The attraction is obvious — it typically requires no capital expenditures and no team of in-house IT experts, and you pay for only what you consume. Cloud is here to stay, but there are several trends in 2013 that growing businesses should be aware of. The good news is they all can be navigated for companies that want to reap the benefits of business in the clouds this year.

Growing interest in private or hybrid cloud solutions prompted by security concerns

In a recent survey by ISACA, a nonprofit association of 100,000 IT professionals, fully two-thirds (66 percent) of small or midsize companies feel that the risk of cloud computing outweighs the benefit. Only 10 percent use the public cloud for mission-critical IT applications, vs. nearly triple that number who use private clouds for the applications they count on to run their business. That preference for private or hybrid clouds is expected to increase in 2013…

The convenience and cost efficiency of public clouds also bring big security risks. Here are the four main ones:

• Unavailability through malicious overuse, or what is called a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack
• Loss of data due to deliberate destruction
• Theft of the data
• Data disclosure to unauthorized staff, organizations or the public. This includes the undesirable yet legal access to a company’s data from outside the country due to different regulations across international borders…

Read more from the source @ http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/3812-cloud-computing-risks-rewards.html