Tuesday, June 12th, 2012
While the problems with employing consumer-grade applications such as Dropbox instead of enterprise cloud storage systems have been documented in the past, new worries are on the rise. Computerworld reported that there is widesoread anxiety in the IT world that the profusion of private documents on consumer clouds will make the services appealing targets for hackers.
"These cloud data centers are becoming high-value targets," security expert DonHinchliffe told the source. "You have to remember, 90 percent of all data break-ins are caused by someone inside the company with the keys to the castle – a systems administrator that's being paid to tap a customer list or download customers' credit card information."
The source found that employees are considering unauthorized consumer clouds due to attraction to new technology. Users eager to access files on mobile devices at companies with no overarching cloud strategy can be tempted to try a convenient but ultimately unsafe alternative.
Dropbox has also achieved negative publicity in the political sphere. When a hacker reported to Gawker Media that he had broken into Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's private email account, he revealed that he also had access to Romney's Dropbox account, underlining the risk of consumer technology being used for official purposes in any field.
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Tags: Cloud and Security
