How safe is the cloud?

[Moz]

Cloud based services (SaaS) is really starting to take off now and the time feels right to start seriously considering cloud based applications. However, I have one niggling concern - data security.

Some major organisations have been the victims of successful hacking attacks in recent times and some of these are actually technology companies themselves.

This raises some very serious questions for employers adopting cloud based HR systems, which potentially hold sensitive data about their employees.

The obvious ones are, how secure is the service provider's system?
and, how do they ensure it stays secure?

I can't help wondering what the consequences would be if a large organisation's employee records were accessed by hackers.

Does anyone else have any concerns about this or am I just being paranoid?

[Brad@Triscope]

You bring up some relevant points. Here is a good article from Deloitte's website on HR and the cloud HR in the Cloud: It?s Inevitable | Human Capital Trends 20| Deloitte Consulting interesting stuff.

[Moz]

Originally Posted by Brad@Triscope

You bring up some relevant points. Here is a good article from Deloitte's website on HR and the cloud HR in the Cloud: It?s Inevitable | Human Capital Trends 20| Deloitte Consulting interesting stuff.

Under "Lessons from the front lines" it says;

"Security. SaaS security may be as effective as security associated with in-house data centers, but many companies just don’t have the comfort level to go down this path. And even some early adopters are keeping particularly sensitive applications in house.

Surely where the SaaS service was located geographically would also be an important factor. At the end of the day the weakest point in security is usually human beings!