Can the Cloud Be More Secure Than Your Own Servers? (Video)

Sarah Lahav, CEO of Sysaid, believes "the cloud" can be more secure than keeping your software and data behind your firewall and administering it yourself, especially for small and medium-sized firms. Why? Because Amazon, Rackspace, and other major cloud and SaaS providers probably have lots more security experts and other IT people at their command than you do.

We've talked to Sarah before, and probably will again. She has strong opinions based on her experience in IT, and is happy to share those opinions. So take it away, Sarah...

Comments

This is stupid.

[SecurityGuy]

Can the cloud be more secure than your own servers? Yes.
Can the cloud be less secure than your own servers? Yes.

Um.... maybe... sometimes.... it depends

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Amazon, Rackspace, and other major cloud and SaaS providers probably have lots more security experts and other IT people at their command than you do.

But those experts aren't regularly upgrading software I run on their cloud systems to fix security holes, nor monitoring my sites for exploits. So their expertise buys me little--other than the underlying infrastructure hopefully will be sound. That's all. That's not lot. The majority of security bugs/holes I've had experience seeing exploited were holes in application packages (think WordPress). Unless you mean hosting your resources on a specific application hosting provider who handles all upgrades (i.e. a hosted WordPress provider in this example, who guarantees up-to-date bug fixes on WordPress and some set of commonly used plugins).

Cloud is less secure in one critical way

[alispguru]

If data is on my personal server and the US government wants to see it, they need a warrant.

If it's on a cloud server, they don't.