by admin | Jul 24, 2015 | Advisory, Enterprise
It’s a natural response. Your business runs on accounting data: profits; turnover; payroll; etc. Someone getting access to that data, whether they’re a competitor hoping to discover your pricing strategy and undercut you, or a disgruntled customer planning to dump your data online and discredit your business, is your worst nightmare. It’d be lunacy to put all that data into the cloud, which everyone knows is insecure. Except that’s wrong. Counter-intuitively, storing your data in the cloud – especially accounting data – is much more secure than storing it locally on your own computers. Why? Because, as David Linthicum helpfully describes, there’s a difference between control and security. When your accounting data lives on your hardware, you have full control of it. But it’s not very secure. To see what this means, imagine someone wants to gain access to your accounts. Imagine you own and run a fleet of ice cream vans, which drive every day to the best rural paradises Britain has to offer, refreshing those who wish to relax in nature with refreshing, organic gelato. One day, a family drives to a cool and shady glen, and amuse themselves by dropping litter, destroying flora, and terrifying fauna. They then, upon wishing to avail themselves of an ice cream, discover you’re no longer stocking chocolate in solidarity with the cocoa bean pickers of Ghana. Furious, they leave, vowing revenge. They have a cunning plan – they’ll hack into your accounts and publish them online, so that your competitors realise the size of the market you’ve tapped into. Rival ice cream vans will descend, and the unspoilt idylls will...
