Posted on 09/18/2013 10:24:30 AM PDT by shego
The NSA's activities are a massive blow for US computer businesses
"It's an ill bird," runs the adage, "that fouls its own nest." Cue the US National Security Agency (NSA), which, we now know, has been busily doing this for quite a while. As the Edward Snowden revelations tumbled out, the scale of the fouling slowly began to dawn on us.
Outside of the United States, for example, people suddenly began to have doubts about the wisdom of entrusting their confidential data to cloud services operated by American companies on American soil. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president responsible for digital affairs, put it in a speech on 4 July: "If businesses or governments think they might be spied on, they will have less reason to trust the cloud and it will be cloud providers who ultimately miss out.... Customers will act rationally and providers will miss out on a great opportunity."
Which providers? Why, the big US internet companies that have hitherto dominated the market for cloud services--a market set to double in size to $200bn (£126bn) over the next three years. So the first own goal scored by the NSA was to undermine an industry that many people had regarded as the next big thing in corporate computing.
The second own goal (or unintended consequence, to give it its technical name) came from the revelation that the NSA had cracked or circumvented the encryption systems used by internet companies, banks and other organisations to persuade consumers that online transactions could be confidential and secure. Given that one of the great triumphs of the industry had been to persuade initially sceptical users that it was safe to conduct transactions online, this was a staggering revelation, the implications of which will be very far-reaching....
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Why in the world would any idiot (or idiot business) let any other business (or idiot business) control and maintain their personal and business records?
Once it leaves your physical presence and protective control, you are only asking for misery some time in the future. Worse yet, the company you let control and store your data can hold it for ransom if you don’t comply with their wishes.
What fools people have become? Take responsibility for your own data and information storage. Cloud storage is the worst idea I’ve ever heard of and as a businessman, I can’t even imagine letting anyone or any business store and control my business information.
Worried about data storage? Go out and buy more flash or hard drives. At least you can unplug them and store them is a safe. Kind of hard to hack them wouldn’t it? Better yet, have the most sensitive part of your computer system totally off-line and without the ability to ever connect to the web or to send/receive anything via internet.
When you go to cloud storage you are really inviting their system to actually enter your computer system and who really knows what happens then.
The day will certainly come when cloud systems will be hacked and then we will see and hear the “gnashing of the teeth and the pulling of the teeth” by the fools who brought it upon themselves.
That said, the damage this entrenched bureaucracy is doing to the economy is a separate issue.
These revelations should destroy any confidence in the Internet, but I doubt that most people realize or care. Streaming data can be intercepted and decrypted. Nothing of a sensitive nature should be uploaded or transmitted.
It is such a fundamental betrayal of public trust that it would be like discovering that our currency has no actual backing of any kind. Uh, no, wait.....
Hell no to the cloud. You’re an idiot if you think its save from prying eyes and the highest bidder.
A consumer can buy a terabyte (trillion bytes) drive for less than $100.
Drive space is so cheap it is completely idiotic to “outsource” data storage, whether for personal or business use.
The “cloud” buzzword was only coined to sell more storage by having businesses spend on new racks of servers to be set up and used in a “cloud” configuration.
Why in the world would any idiot (or idiot business) let any other business (or idiot business) control and maintain their personal and business records?
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LOL.
Never heard of Iron Mountain? Or ADP?
the cloud is dead
prior to snowden, the fear was the cloud provider eventually charging you for access to your data once you’re dependent on the cloud
and now these services will also give complete access to the fedgov?
yea. stick a fork in it
I have said this for years. I equate outsourcing to off-shore developers the same. Why trust your business product(s) and code base to people not even in your same country?
$$$ is the answer, managers in their quest to cut costs fall into the trap of the cloud and off-shoring thinking they will save money. In the long run you don’t especially if a catastrophic event occurs.
“Never heard of Iron Mountain?”
You wanna bet that iron mountain is actively turning over backup data to the NSA? I’m sure these folks have active duplication systems just for that purpose. If they denied it, would you beloved them?
Iron mountain is likely an arm of the gov’t spy apparatus. It’s too easy.
the “cloud concept” was never trust worthy from the outset.
it was always a model for a monthly utility fee for access to your own data.
It was and is a marketing gimick for the sucker.
Gosh, I wasn’t trying to go down the NSA road with my comment, only addressing the notion that only idiots turn over their data to other groups and then charge you to access it.
Businesses have been doing that since the cloud referred only to water vapor in the sky.
You’re correct in that regard. But when you mentioned Iron Mountain, I had just been thinking along the lines of my post. It’s too easy....everyone takes there data to a central place for easy storage and snoopage.
The cost of having onsite backup is higher than say, using a cloud service. So a company comes in, makes a pitch to someone in accounting who does not understand the situation, saying “We will save you $X if we store all your data!”
Of course, there have already been cases where the company storing it uses the data. I think it was Bloomberg services, but I may be wrong.
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