Obstacles to Cloud Computing in China – Part IV, Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD)

The Issue: There’s no question that moving to the cloud can be a nervous experience. Especially for your IT staff and managers, who are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data.

Key Point: This is a common problem and an EASY one for the executive to beat. But unless it’s done with focus and consistently, Fear alone can defeat all of your plans for a successful, cost-saving deployment. You need to communicate the mission to go cloud, and not to give up or go back!

How do You Know FUD? : FUD usually comes up through you organization in 3 big statements.

1. (Security FUD): What if they lose our data? Or what if there is a big fire or someone steals our data from the data center? If someone steals your password, they can access our whole system from anywhere.”
2. (Ownership & Control FUD): “Right now I can control, access and touch the servers and hardware. If you move our servers to the cloud, they’ll be somewhere in the US or UK – we can never see them.”
3. (Resistance to Change FUD): “What we have now is working fine – why do we need to change? I’m too busy to work on a new system that will just slow me down.”

FUD is not always bad, but in this case, the three above make little business sense and if you let them beat you, your staff and your company will pay the price in resources lost.

SO, let’s look at what the business reasons are for answering the above challenges. Today, we will address issue number 1 – Security FUD! :

1. Security FUD
   1. First lets address the idea of the vendor losing your data, by data theft or natural disaster.
      1. In most cases, the data is much more secure in the type of data center used by good cloud vendors such as box.net or NetSuite than any sort of server farm in the local company. They feature armed guards, cameras, strong firewalls, antivirus and intrusion protection software packages, and that’s just the beginning. If a company wanted to match these data centers, they would need to be massive global corporations.
      2. In addition, these robust data centers are built to withstand massive fires, earthquakes and flooding. They are backed up in other states and countries and the technology used for restoring data is top of the line.
      3. Often times when we hear a business owner say this to us, I find that their server is in a room next door in a poorly secured area, backed up only rarely, and (in several cases) even not working because of issues with hardware and software. Make no mistake about it, when a system isn’t working, it’s costing you money!
      4. The truth is that for you to have the same level of service and security
   2. Now let’s consider the other FUD factor for security – stealing passwords for total access
      1. Impossible unless your configuration is completely incorrect (something Trigger has never seen). This is one we often hear, but the truth is that vendors like NetSuite and Box.net are very secure systems
      2. They use industry-strength encryption for transmissions, and allow for tight restrictions on access to resources based on roles. Certainly not a green light to access all data.
      3. Also, because of the nature of a cloud system, as soon as an issue is detected, it’s quick and easy for administrators to log into the system and take away the account in question.
      4. Finally, the rules for protecting passwords are the same for every system. If they steal a password for a client-server system, they’ll have the same access, but you may not have the same backups in place!