PRISM: No Reason to Shy Away From U.S. Cloud Providers

Grazed from BroadWay World. Author: Editorial Staff.

PRISM has brought many European and Asian companies to believe that using a U.S.-based cloud services provider is insecure and will allow the U.S. Government to snoop on their data. As a result, some are predicting a slow-down in cloud adoption, specifically the uptake of cloud services based in the United States. Unfortunately, the victim in this scenario is the enterprise themselves, since many of the leading and most in-demand cloud SaaS offerings are based in North America. But with the proper security solutions in place, enterprises can confidently adopt cloud services based anywhere in the world while keeping their data resident and within their full control, thereby eliminating concerns about 3rd parties accessing their sensitive corporate information.

Survey results recently released from the Cloud Security Alliance indicate that more than half of the non-U.S. residents questioned were less likely to use U.S.-based cloud services since becoming aware of the PRISM program. This sort of data has industry analyst firms such as GigaOM observing that PRISM may be a windfall for non-U.S. cloud providers. While there are some types of cloud services where the choice to move to a local provider may be fairly trivial, it becomes quite challenging at the SaaS “layer” of the cloud…

Here, enterprises are adopting cloud services that go beyond simple compute-power or storage services. Instead, they are adopting mission-critical applications, such as services to run their Customer Management and Support Operations, or Sales or Human Resources functions. Clearly, having the “best” application to manage their business is critical to their success. Given PRISM concerns, do they now need to eliminate a series of leading applications from their consideration just because they are based in the United States? A category of products, referred to by Gartner as Cloud Encryption Gateways, may prove to be the solution to this problem…

Read more from the source @ http://geeks.broadwayworld.com/article/PRISM-No-Reason-to-Shy-Away-From-US-Cloud-Providers-20130731