Cloud computing certainly sounds appealing to the IT department, whether you’re thinking about going for software as a service, infrastructure as a service, or platform as a service. However, if you need to pass this solution through the higher ups who aren’t as familiar with cloud technology, you need to have a good way of managing their security concerns.
It might come off as a big disingenuous to tell management that you want to send your data offsite to keep it safer than having it in physical servers, after all.
Acknowledge Security Concerns
Find out exactly what aspect of cloud security is concerning to the decision makers in the company. They might not be the same concerns that you would expect as an IT professional. In fact, some of the concerns might not actually apply to cloud computing at all, let alone cloud storage. Once you have identified the exact problem, it’s much easier to explain why it wouldn’t be an issue if you moved data to cloud services.
Explain Security Handling
Each cloud solutions provider has different ways of handling security, so find out exactly what these methods are before you propose moving any of your data to the cloud. If you come with as much security knowledge in hand as possible, you’ll come off as having complete confidence in this solution.
Show Examples of Cloud Computing in Use
What the business management might not understand is that they’re already using cloud computing, in some cases rather extensively. Various Google services and the Amazon content delivery system already fall under cloud computing, so once you point that out they’ll be a lot more receptive to the idea of other types of cloud computing. It always helps if you have white papers, case studies, and other information that the business department can use to help with the approval process.
Show How Cloud Storage Improves The Company
The best way to get your business on board with cloud storage solutions is describing the exact ways that everyone will benefit. Some common ways of showing the advantages of cloud storage is explaining the safety of offsite storage. Another benefit is the fact that you don’t have to worry about physical servers that need space in your data center, regular maintenance, updates, troubleshooting, and monitoring. The cost savings is another point that will get management paying attention to this solution.
Scalability
Another way that cloud computing differs from taking care of all of your storage hardware is the fact that you can dynamically scale the amount of storage that you need. Instead of overbuying servers for a big launch or marketing campaign, your virtualized storage gives you exactly the amount of data that you need. Once again, you can frame this as a cost saving measure to management.
Avoiding Data Loss
Data loss is one of the most cited concerns for cloud computing. You don’t want to go through all of the work of talking your company into using cloud services, then have all of your data lost or leaked. Once you can get your bosses understanding that the top cloud storage services have extensive security measures, you can also start talking about how security loopholes are less likely to exist because the storage company is going to take care of updates, instead of the onsite IT staff that has other responsibilities.
Downtime
The other major concern is not so much security issues, but the possibility of downtime. This is certainly a concern with onsite servers and storage hardware as well, so it’s not exactly unique to the cloud. However, it’s important to check out the uptime guarantees with each service, as well as finding out what happens in the event of power loss or disaster. Ask what kind of redundancy is in place, such as having data centers in disparate geographical locations that accounts roll over to.
It might take some time to sell everyone on the idea of cloud storage, but it’s going to get easier and easier as it becomes a part of everyday and business life. Once you calm them down about the security concerns and misconceptions, you’ll have much less of an issue in making this technology work for you.
I can see this proving to be a good back-up system, my neighbour lost all his stuff and it seriously affected his business.