Practicing safe SaaS: The new reality of information technology

Grazed from VentureBeat. Author: Editorial Staff.

Once a catchy PR buzzword, the cloud has become a very real and vital element of the modern technology landscape. But as with every technological step forward, the cloud has brought with it some unintended side effects. In the case of enterprise cloud technology, those side effects include concerns over loss of control and security risks.

That’s especially true since revelations were made earlier this year about mass data surveillance programs, such as the National Security Agency’s PRISM project. If you host your company’s data in a public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, what assurances do you have that government agencies aren’t monitoring — or may subpoena — your data? Cloud providers have stated unequivocally that they do not give direct access to the NSA, FBI, or other organizations — but it’s also widely known that the these agencies have broad access to many data sources once considered private…

What’s more, the government agencies have the legal capability, via National Security Letters, to request information along with a gag order that prevents the subpoenaed company from talking about the request at all. During the last six months of 2012, Facebook said it had received as many as 10,000 requests from local, state, and federal agencies, which impacted as many as 19,000 of its 1.1 billion accounts worldwide. Over the same period, Microsoft received between 6,000 and 7,000 criminal and security warrants, subpoenas and orders affecting as many as 32,000 customer accounts. As a result, a public denial might not even mean anything…

Read more from the source @ http://venturebeat.com/2013/10/02/practicing-safe-saas-the-new-reality-of-information-technology/