Cloud Computing and Data Disclosure -- http://bit.ly/XkrQ8

[LJMecca]

Since laws have been passed mandating the disclosure of data breaches,
over 285 million records of personal information have been reportedly
lost by companies. Cloud computing services for data storage fix some
of the issues; for example, a company won't lose a tape or disk backup
being shipped to an off-site location.

However, it also creates new problems. For one, the data is out there
on the Internet as opposed to being kept locally behind firewalls.
For another, the number of copies made also multiplies the number of
attack vectors for that data.

Cleversafe (as part of their response to the conversation around their
"3 reasons that encryption is overrated" blog post -- http://bit.ly/EokrT)
wrote a blog post regarding this problem and how information dispersal
may be an ideal solution for limiting risk of data exposure.

Unfortunately the federal bills that have been proposed give no regard
for whether or not the data that was compromised was encrypted or not,
but perhaps dispersal provides a way out.

Full post available here: http://bit.ly/XkrQ8

[eprpa...@gmail.com]

Even if the data is in the "cloud" it is behind a firewall. No
corporation will put their resources on the "Internet" directly. So what
applies to a corporate owner of data will apply to the cloud center.

Second, as for "data dispersal" as per cleversafe, the problem with
thinking your data is overly secure is that once you understand the
algorithm for dispersing it, you can put it back together again.

Even the algorithms themselves that do the encryption might have
backdoors. That was always the contention with DES (though it was never
proven).

There are no holy grails in just because the data is in the cloud. It
is no more or less secure than in any corporate environment. What is
lost is that once it is in the cloud the owner of the data is at the
mercy of the cloud center operator!

Chance