Is my cloud secure? Part I

How do you know if your cloud is secure?
Certifications Part I

Companies that are considering moving their sensitive data to the cloud are sometimes concerned about security. And yet, cloud is no longer a question – it’s an answer. It’s the answer to how to compete in today’s marketplace. So the better question is: How do you evaluate the risk in moving to a cloud hosting provider? There are many answers to this question, and they depend on the type of risk you’re worried about. For example, are you worried about the individuals hosting your data? Make sure you select a cloud provider that mandates background checks on its employees. Are you worried about the data center itself? About business continuity? File sharing? Encryption? All these are valid concerns.

One of the best ways to address these concerns is by asking a cloud hosting company for their certifications. Your applications and data should be hosted in a data center that is in compliance with regulations and industry best practices. But certifications frequently come in an alphabet soup that is hard to decipher if you’re not familiar with it.

At Calitech™ we work with some companies that have US federal contracts, and with others that operate in extremely privacy-sensitive industries such as healthcare, so up-to-date certifications are very important to us and we’re very proud of them. In our next blog post we will address two key certifications that you should request from your potential cloud hosting company, whether you are in the US, Central America, South America or elsewhere: SOC and HIPAA.