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A question for technology involved legal personnel.

How do your clientele copes with possible and omnipresent threats in modern and connected world of business?

Some of my observations and advice:

Source: PRWire

Consequently, Ninefold, Australian major cloud services provider, has released a number of resources on its website (currently taken down, alternative source) designed to help businesses understand the issues, assess the risks and design an appropriate data strategy.Ninefold’s call to the industry follows recent comments from Microsoft UK that European data centres would be required to comply with any requests for access under The US Patriot Act and may be restricted from informing those whose data is affected.

Simply put, US owns the data in data centers of US companies even though they're not on US soil. Ninefold made an example out of Amazon Australia stating that Australians should fear their privacy due to mentioned US law.

What an irony. Australians should fear US?

In detail:

IT industry has always been in the habit of moving in cycles. Just like the fashion industry, most trends in IT industry come, go and then suddenly return. According to market experts, cloud computing is about to become such a trend. It seems cloud computing will soon go out of fashion, a lot faster than it came in.

Since the PRISM and NSA breakout, data security risks associated with cloud computing have been completely exposed. Although everyone should have been prepared for it, nobody really was. Moreover, this exposure has also resulted in raised eyebrows about whether business organizations want to invest in a cloud strategy or not.

According to industry experts, the news of NSA and PRISM break out has completely messed up with business plans of almost every cloud vendor. With what’s been happening recently, on-premise software has once again become the first choice of most business organizations.

When the News about Snowden broke out, you could realize its impact on cloud computing. However, you could not have realized that this impact would hit the industry this fast.

Recently, Information Technology and Innovation Forum (ITIF) accepted that business organizations fear data security and privacy. As a result, cloud computing industry is about to take a hit amounting to $36 billion by 2016. The main cause has been PRISM.

According to an analyst, this is just a conservative estimate and the impact could easily cost this industry about $180 billion (More Info: Forbes).

However, there is a need to understand that even third-party encryption and security vendors will also suffer because of PRISM. In fact, two email encryption services, Silent Circle and Lavabit, shut down businesses because of NSAspying. Silent Circle did not want to risk customers’ privacy. Thus, it just killed Silent Mail.

Most of the companies are ready to shut down businesses instead of risking their values and customers’ data. Such companies have been losing most business. In fact, it raises a lot more questions. Customers have been wondering if it is worth investing in encryption services if the Government can simply knock on the doors and ask for their information (More: PCWorld ).

What Happens Next?

 

Most people are wondering about what’s going to happen next. People are still not clear where they can go from here.

Can they simply switch back to on-premise or stay with cloud and forget everything that happened?

This is a great opportunity for vendors who have focused on on-premise software or advocate a hybrid strategy.

Here is a list of some important considerations:

• Don’t trust a third-party. Bring your own encryption.

• Examine cloud contract and check who is responsible for your data.

• Know the physical location of your servers.

• Select a hybrid strategy that suits your business.

• Consider the importance of cloud-cloud integration.

• Consider the strength of cloud developers.

It is important to understand that it may be difficult for cloud to survive during this storm. As mentioned earlier, trends in IT industry come and go like the fashion industry.

However, cloud computing has become much more than just a trend. You just need to wait for it to come back with a bang.

Stronger encryption and newer methods, harsh policies towards US based companies, privacy boost and new security protocols are just couple to name.