The do’s and don’ts of safeguarding cloud-based data with encryption

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Thomas J. Trappler.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for companies contemplating entrusting a cloud-computing vendor with their data is the risk of unintended data exposure. A lot of data is sensitive. It might contain employees’ financial information, patients’ statutorily protected health information, other regulated information or proprietary intellectual property. Quite often, companies feel more control when they keep that sort of data in-house. But the risk that a cloud vendor might not handle your information as securely as you’d like can be mitigated.

One good way to do that is with encryption. An encryption algorithm encodes data, rendering it unreadable to those who don’t possess the decoding key. The idea is that, if encrypted data falls into the wrong hands, it will be of little or no use without the encryption key…

This can help mitigate concerns related to the data being hacked or even being legitimately accessed by a government, which is a particular concern when the data center where the data is being stored by the cloud vendor is located in a foreign country. If you’re depending on encryption to protect your cloud-based data, you’ll need to determine how the cloud vendor facilitates encryption. Questions to ask include the following:…

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