Thursday, February 11, 2010

You only think your data is secure

rt @lmacvittie @cswolf The nature of "Cloud" suggests asset location is irrelevant. Except for control, management, integration, costs...

@bdunbar How secure is it, really?

Not less secure than an a racked server sitting in your server room.

I've been doing this IT thing for a few years.  The number of actually secure data centers I have seen I could count on the fingers of one hand.

More common are servers racked in closets that might have a key lock.  And which probably had the door propped open to keep the space cool.  Spaces where you could pop a ceiling tile in the adjacent un-secure space and crawl into the same room with the machine.  One place where a bored tech on the 3rd shift tunneled under the raised floor and right into another companies server room next door. [1] 

If the data lives on equipment in the same building you might have a good guess as to how secure things are.  Across the street .. not so much.  If it's across town or across the country you have no idea, really.

Might as well shove it into the cloud if it will save some money.


[1] Which really livened things up on their 3rd shift when Jay strolled into their office inside the data center.  'Hi, I'm from next door and I was bored: how you guys doing?'



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