Great piece by Brian Proffitt on RWW on the continuing controversy surrounding the U.S. government’s reported monitoring of online data via FISA court orders and projects like PRISM.
“…projects like PRISM may have far-reaching implications for users of public cloud computing. Specifically, it could drive more enterprise customers towards storage solutions that are held behind the corporate firewall.”
“File-storage service ownCloud, for example, is already seeing validation of its approach to house data inside the client company’s infrastructure, not out in the cloud.”
Said our own Matt Richards: “It’s just another reason why we are telling people to keep data local.” ownCloud, he added, has been working with customers in Europe for quite some time, so data privacy has long been a key focus for the company. That’s because European Union corporations are legally bound by the European Commission Directive on Data Protection (ECDDP), which blocks data from being transferred to outside the European Economic Area and encourages companies to keep their data behind the firewall.
Remember, ownCloud not only allows you to store your own data on your own servers, it also is installed directly on your servers, integrating into your current data security, governance and auditing tools. Nothing leaves the firewall that you do not want to leave, and everything that is synced and shares is done within corporate IT guidelines.
Writes Proffitt: “Many companies have made broad use of cloud-storage solutions like Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox and Bitcasa – services that offer free and relatively inexpensive cloud-based storage. These services, though, have always carried some risk for corporate users, and now we can add potential government access of data to the list.”
We agree.
