Security in the Cloud - is your data safe?

Cloud Computing - who has access to your data?

What is "Cloud Computing"? Basically, cloud computing is the idea of hosting both software and data on the internet. This simplifies data sharing for offices and makes it convenient for sales people to correspond with their parent companies by having "real-time" access to information. It is also cost effective because instead of maintaining your own IT staff, you can get online collaboration tools for around $22 - 50/month and let the professionals hosting your service deal with the headaches of maintaining the servers. What is the downside? SECURITY.

How can you be sure that your data is secure when you are using the cloud for software and data storage? Consider this...your company starts off small with a dedicated server hosted in the cloud. As your company grows, your bandwidth and server needs will also grow. When you decide to upgrade your server to another server, how can you be sure that the sensitive data on the older hard drives are properly destroyed? A growing trend in data security is hard drive destruction services, but is your hosting provider offering this as a security option?

A hard drive shredder will physically destroy the hard drive into scrap metal and will be impossible to retrieve any data from. Make sure that you are asking your hosting provider about the security options that are available to you.

Alan Ross Machinery has a complete inventory of hard drive shredders that can provide the security you deserve.