Thursday, October 14, 2010

A little thought about computing clouds and physical security

Clouds are not so cloudy that they don't sit on God's green earth.
I was thinking that with so much data concentration, and data of so much value, what would prevent people to break physically into data centers to rob data?

After all, who says data banks says data hold-ups...

I can think of four reasons why they wouldn't make a hold-up to steal data from a data center:
  1. It's probably easier to steal it online.
  2. It's certainly safer to steal it online.
  3. If you're breaking into a place you've never been, finding what you're looking for may be messier for a data center than for a bank.
  4. The adoption rate of this kind of crime would probably be very slow: burglars are not accustomed to data centers and black hats are not accustomed to hold-up parties. They probably don't share a lot of "good practices".
Yet, these barriers do not seem to apply to States and polices. They can easily break into a data center, they do not fear any defence from the "victim", they have all the time they need, and they probably can gather people accustomed to both heated situations and computer hacking.

So I was thinking that data of interest to a State should probably not be stored within its reach.

However, I don't have a clue how the visibility of a criterion such as the geographical situation of data may evolve in the next years for the cloud customer :-|

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