CLOUD SECURITY FEARS REVIVED

By D.E. Levine

Twitter Inc's implementation of Google Apps was breached in July and it allowed hackers access to confidential company documents via a hijacked Gmail account of an employee.

This breach resulted in some local law enforcement and public interest groups in Los Angeles to cite potential security concerns since the city plans to replace Novell GroupWise e-mail and Microsoft Office with Google Inc's hosted e-mail and office productivity applications.

L.A. city officials cite a savings of $13 million in software licensing and personnel costs over a 5-year period due to the switch.

However, an advocacy group from Santa Monica, Consumer Watchdog, raised the question of whether Google's offered cloud provides adequate safeguards. The group urged the city councilors to have IT personnel test the Google Apps with a small group of users first, instead of implementing it for 30,000 users.

Consumer Watchdog advocates insisting on appropriate guarantees and significant financial penalties in the event that security is not up to par and any security breach occurs. The World Privacy Forum encourage the city of L.S. to move slowly and cautiously in implementing Google Apps.

But Google officers claim the outcry is based on incomplete information and even suggests moving to Google is a security upgrade, citing lack of familiarity with cloud computing as the reason for the misunderstanding.

As with any migration, it's always suggested that comprehensive risk assessments be done before migrating to any product, especially cloud-based products which are relatively new. As always, there are significant privacy and security issues when using applications hosted off-site by other companies.