Potential of the Cloud
While leading cloud computing service providers such as Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure continue to grow, software as a service (SaaS) will need to focus on improved customer experience, ongoing maintenance, and lower delivery and support costs. At the same time, SaaS must overcome user challenges such as weak computational power, slow processing speeds, lack of employee training, and high energy and environmental costs. Commercial cloud computing service providers may find themselves struggling with aging architecture, security, and scalability in the future. Hybrid solutions seem to be the answer for today’s challenges with cloud computing.
According to Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, companies that have shifted from on-site resources to all-cloud computing have not returned to traditional data centers, with even large companies embracing third-party cloud infrastructure. Gartner estimates that the worldwide public cloud services market will grow to $411B by 2020 and predicts that by 2021, 28 percent of all IT spending will be for cloud-based infrastructure, middleware, application and business process services.
Security is an Issue
As pressure to move to cloud services increases, executives realize that cloud computing has had or will have a measurable impact on their business. According to survey of 997 technical professionals conducted by Rightscale, 81 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy. However, it seems that companies may find themselves becoming overwhelmed with switching from private data centers to cloud infrastructure. Security has been one major barrier for organizations when it comes to moving to the cloud. 77 percent of respondents indicated that security is a challenge for them and managing cloud spend was a challenge for 76 percent of respondent.
With so many data in the cloud, employers can feel like there is no real secure method of file sharing or storage. Companies will need to find secure alternatives for their employees to share documents that they can deploy at the enterprise level. Without a standardized approach, employees are bound to use a plethora of free vendors, have numerous accounts, which are likely not to be audited or monitored. Companies should advocate for using secure enterprise cloud software.
If you choose to upload your files via a cloud service, consider the following issues:
- What are the privacy and security policies? How is your data protected? Who has access to the servers?
- What is the backup and failover policy? How soon will the servers brought up? Where are the backups kept? Who has access to the backups?
- What to do if someone hacks into the system and obtains your files?
- Is there data mining on your files? Are you suddenly getting a lot of spam?
- When you delete files on the servers, what happens to the backups? Are they actually deleted or virtually deleted?
Secure File Sharing
Many, if not all, of these issues can be addressed by private and direct file sharing. With direct file sharing, the files are transferred directly between two computers. So, 1) it would be very difficult to intercept and mine your data and 2) only two copies exist; one which was sent and one which was received.
Binfer is one of the few solution in the world that can transfer large files of any quantity from computer to computer in a secure way. Try Binfer today.
