Secure communications solutions and virtual workplace IT from the cloud

Since the dawn of cloud computing, many companies have remained skeptical towards the cloud on one issue: applications from the cloud are insecure and data in the cloud is not protected sufficiently. For around three out of four companies that do not use any cloud services yet, security concerns and compliance issues are the main reasons holding them back, as revealed in a survey published by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) and the auditing and consultancy firm PwC in March 2015. Reservations are especially strong where the communications and collaboration of employees and companies could be directly affected: for example concerning Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) or classic workplace applications such as Office and the like. Even spectacular, successful hacker attacks on systems of companies that operate their own IT have had little impact on this opinion to date – at least in Germany. The thought remains: doing it yourself is more secure than the cloud.

Why do people fear potentially disastrous data leaks? Firstly, data privacy and data security continue to be lumped together. Although data privacy is not possible without data security, they are different sides of the same coin. As such, high-security data centers protected by every possible means can be located anywhere in the world. Yet they are still insecure from the data privacy perspective. After all, wherever local laws regarding the handling of personal information are lax, the data processed and stored in high-security data centers is still not safe from misuse – as the Snowden affair has shown

Protecting data against hackers – and against unauthorized access and loss in general – demands a large technical and professional effort. Hackers are employing increasingly professional methods in their attempts to infiltrate the IT systems of companies and institutions. Classic defensive measures such as anti-virus protection and firewalls do not go far enough. Effective IT security is becoming expensive and complex in the long run, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are just as dependent on their IT systems as major companies. Cloud services could make an important contribution to IT security in companies, said Achim Berg, vice president BITKOM (the German Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications, and New Media) when he presented the "Cloud Monitor 2015". "This raises the issue of whether the in-house IT department can better protect against data theft than a specialized cloud service provider." The ISACA and PwC survey confirms: around a quarter of those surveyed expect a higher level of information security when cloud services are used.