Who’s securing “My Stuff” at Google, Microsoft and Yahoo?

We think the security threat landscape changes every day. Now the underlying assumptions about what we have to secure and where are changing like a foundation made of sand.

Microsoft is beta testing Microsoft Office Live Workspace to create a virtual shared folders workspace online. WSJ rumored that Google is planning the “My Stuff” service to provide 10-400GB of space for between $20 and $500 per year. Live Documents is a startup offering similar services. An add from MicroCenter (my favorite geek store) arrived in my mailbox today; 4GB USB flash drives are $24.99 for Christmas.

And of course, we have Amazon S3 (Secure Storage Service) and EC2 offerings for hosting data center compute and storage by the drip. Cisco’s WebEx and Salesforce Exchange are other On Demand framework and cloud offerings for software delivery. Applications are moving outside of the datacenter into computing and storage clouds and predictions are this will continue to be a strong trend.

Will everything evacuate the datacenter? I’m not saying the company data center is going away, just that the total picture of what we think of as the datacenter is expanding outside the four walls of traditional datacenters. Large enterprises and high volume systems aren’t moving anytime soon but software they use is often being provided through On Demand services. On Demand is something many medium and small businesses use every day. Take payroll, if you don’t run it internally you very likely access the payroll system through web based software, and many general purpose and specialized software applications are being offered through On Demand services.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other offerings are just the tip of the iceberg from a business security perspective. Our thinking about security needs to broaden to include the cloud and virtual worlds we and the industry are creating.

See more about Who is rethinking security? on my Network World blog.

Comments

[Sam Van Ryder]

I have always wondered how any of these consumer-targeted services secure the data. And I don't understand why they don't explain what they are doing to protect the data. Until they start showing some clarity on this, I will continue to shy away from these (excellent and highly convenient) services and will be advising friends and family to do so as well. I'm sure we'll be hearing about the first compromises sooner rather than later.