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 turn into arenas displaying capitalism in its most cutthroat variety.

Now, if your accounting data was stored on your computers, you’d be in trouble. This unpleasant gang would draw up one night, smash a few windows, grab your gear, and go. They’d then have plenty of time to break whatever passwords and encryption you were using – once a hacker’s got physical access to a machine there’s little you can do. Worse still, you’d no longer have access to your accounts unless you’d backed them up – but if you were storing the backups on site, they might have taken those as well. Your business would be crippled and their revenge complete.

What if you were using cloud accounting, with all the information stored in a data server? You might expect the cloud to be less secure, but it’s just the opposite. The cloud accounting providers Aiteo works with all use bank-grade security systems to protect your data. These techniques really work – for example, 256-bit AES SSL encryption. It sounds arcane, but what it does is encrypt your data so that no-one can read it. A hacker could try to break it by setting a program to try every possible combination to see which one works – a technique called brute-forcing. But 256-bit SSL is so strong that even if they used Tianhe-2, the world’s fastest supercomputer to date, trying every possibility would take them 10.3×10^45 years: that’s about 10 billion billion billion billion billion years!

There are lots of other technical details which you can check if you want to. The point remains the same: cloud accounting is not only very secure; it’s actually more secure than the alternative, because cloud accounting firms have the resources to invest in top-level security, and you don’t. Whether you’re promoting international social justice via the medium of frozen food or doing something a little more mundane, you can be confident that no disgruntled customers will steal your data. With uninterruptible power supplies and multiple backups per day, you can also be confident your financial data will always be accessible in the cloud.

Of course, it’s all very well having secure data once it’s got to the cloud – but what about getting it there? That’s a subject for another post.