GlassDeviant

November 19, 2009 at 11:09am

It seems to me that it would be natural for a hosting company to come up with a survey that favours their model of data centre provisioning. It seems even more natural for them to hedge this survey by making it appear to be very close, but slightly in their favour. There is a lot that can be done with statistics, for instance what did the survey say about companies smaller than 100 or larger than 500 employees? Like the question of how many licks does it take to get to the centre of a Tootsie Roll Pop, the world may never know.

 

As mentioned in another commenter's post, the security of cloud computing has not been proven, and there is no guarantee that some future threat could compromise it in ways never before imagined. Sure, a corporate data centre could be compromised as well, but the security policy of a company's data centre is something under the company's control. Not only does the company not have control over the hosting service's current security policy, they do not have control over the security policy of whatever company may buy out the hosting company at some future date.

 

Given that hosting companies are a dime a dozen, though the next shakedown seems to be looming, I am happier knowing that I have control over my servers' security, and that if I am not confident about it I can hire a security professional to audit and suggest improvements to it. Will a hosting company reveal its security policies in detail to anyone? Not likely, because that would give other people knowledge of what measures are in place. All a crook would need to do is purchase a small hosting contract under false credentials to learn all they needed to know about what the best approach to hacking the provider would be. So clients are left in the dark as to whether their data is really secure. I don't even put my favourite musical artists list on Google Docs, though that is far from private information as it is posted on my website.