Many companies are worried about the security of the data they leave in the hands of cloud computing providers. However, some experts warn there’s an ever costlier threat to watch out for.
There have only been a few known instances of data being breached in the Cloud, says Gartner cloud computing security analyst Jay Heiser. It’s much more likely that a cloud computing service provider will go down, making data temporarily or permanently unavailable.
Heiser cites major outages over the past two years involving Amazon, EC2, Carbonite and others, which in some cases left data unrecoverable.
The loss of data and productivity adds up to create huge financial losses for companies that use cloud computing services. In fact, cloud outages cost businesses an estimated $70 million a year, according to research from the International Working Group on Cloud Computing Resiliency.
While cloud providers are responsible for keeping their own systems up and running, it’s the customers who pay the price after a cloud computing security incident. But despite the risks, just half the organizations surveyed by Gartner have a business continuity plan to address cloud outages.
It’s important for companies to make sure they have plans to back up data that’s kept in the Cloud. Some cloud computing providers offer backups for customers’ data, while in other cases, the company will have to find its own solution.
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