Seeking Safety in Clouds
You are a small or medium-sized business, a data anchovy in a sea of hacker sharks eager to make you their lunch. What can you do—and how can you afford—to keep your data secure?
An increasing number of smaller firms are opting to school for protection, off site and, they hope, out of sight of the sharks. Outsourcing data storage and software operations to an IT management firm is finally catching on in the small and medium-sized business world, which accounts for the vast majority of companies in the U.S.
IT service providers have been around for years, used mostly by big companies. Now, smaller firms are biting too, attracted chiefly by cost savings and service but increasingly by security as well. It's a nervous first bite, though, and just the beginning of a trend in a realm better known by its buzz phrase: "cloud computing," or running operations and storing data on someone else's servers, and then accessing it from office or home via the Internet.
