Moving your data into the cloud creates a raft of security challenges, but according to information security specialists, those challenges are less about hackers and more about data availability and signing the right contracts.

Table of Contents

1. Raising the stakes

   When data is resides in a company's own datacentre, the onus on protecting that data from outage or breach falls upon that company. Cloud turns that on its head.

2. What to look for

   Customers need assurance from their supplier that it can maintain the three pillars of security: confidentiality, data integrity and data availability.

3. Who's responsible?

   A lot of cloud security is about contract management, something that has traditionally been handled by a company's purchasing and legal teams.

4. Crossing boundaries

   Hosting your cloud services on Amazon's servers might make for high availability and redundancy, but that very redundancy can be a problem.