Neither Snowden nor the NSA puts CIOs off the cloud, it's just FUD

The Edward Snowden affair has not put CIOs off the public cloud, but only because IT professionals were already wary of the security issues and vendor lock-in, a Bloomberg tech conference heard last week. A panel discussing the cloud and the enterprise at the Bloomberg Enterprise Technology Summit in London focused on the …

[Pete 2]

No competitive disadvantage

> the NSA rifling through service providers' servers was not seen as exacerbating these concerns.

The reason nobody at the top is concerned is because the NSA are shafting every company, equally. It's not as if there is one particular company that is under greater surveillance than any other - the NSA is being (laudably) non-discriminatory over who's privacy they violate. Therefore there's no reason for customers to single out any one company as having more or less of their rights infringed. It doesn't matter where you go, you'll still be spied on.

Of if the NSA is targeting particular organisations, they've done a better job of keeping that fact under wraps.

[Turtle]

Surprise.

"The Edward Snowden affair has not put CIOs off the public cloud"

I find no surprise in this, or anything else in the article.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Surprise.

"I find no surprise in this, or anything else in the article."

So?

[Anonymous Coward]

NSA are people too

The NSA is an organization of people. People can be corrupted (quite easily, on the whole). Therefore, what the NSA learns about your company by downloading the contents of your cloud can and will be sold to a competitor. That's just a fact of life.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: NSA are people too

Can be and has been:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=airbus_1

[Don Jefe]

Re: NSA are people too

Industrial surveillance/espionage is where security agencies and diplomatic services spend the overwhelming majority of their resources. Military and political surveillance are far lower priority activities. Embassies and consulates are primarily foreign business offices, everything else they do it secondary. It has always been that way. Well, since the days of feudalism were in full swing anyway.

Competitive threats due to information (in)security are what stopped our research into cloudy storage possibilities. There's too much at risk, directly for our clients and internally for us as some of our more valuable processes could be worked out by an industry expert who had access to enough secondary information.

The cloud is a risk each business has to assess on its own. In reality, most businesses don't have information that needs to be very secure. What they value is valuable to them, but worthless for anyone else. The cloud also has advantages for startups and small companies. I can't count how many small operations put themselves into a financial corner, and early death, by building their own infrastructure.

Is the cloud for you? Don't know. It's worth looking into for sure, the accounting advantages alone are substantial, but it wasn't viable for us. I don't think it's viable for anyone who has truly sensitive information to deal with.

[John Sanders]

There is the big elephant in the room

Most people understand cloud as a means to even more outsourcing, and once they discover that "the cloud" (Another form of managed hosting for those who like me despise marketing crap) doesn't mean they can't get rid of all the pesky people in the IT department, the interest fades away and this "cloud" migration just remains something that can be done if the cost & functionality justifies it, rather than something that needs to be done ASAP like virtualization which has many immediate benefits for most business.

Resuming: somebody else owning the servers doesn't mean that that somebody else is going to run your IT for you.

Heck, once you realize that you want security in your hybrid cloud, you realize too that still need the network guys to set-up the VPNs, firewalls etc. Otherwise if you depend on the "Cloud provider" (ISP) prepare to wait a long time each time you want any change done, or prepare to pay.

And forget about the ISP managing your internal applications, that is a big NO, cloud providers are there to make money, not inherit your disasters.

So, not surprised either.

[Oh Homer]

A stacked panel of NSA flunkies

Conclude that CIOs are not concerned about the NSA slurping all their customers' private data. Honest.

Uh-huh.

[Trevor_Pott]

Re: A stacked panel of NSA flunkies

It has nothing to do with them being NSA flunkies. It has everything to do with them being sociopaths ho don't give a flying fuck about anyone but themselves (and their own bank accounts.) It's very rare to those levels in society without being a complete sociopath.

So they're right: enterprise CIOs don't give fuck 1 about the NSA snooping their customers' data unless that could somehow cost them money. While possible, it is unlikely that privacy lawsuits would cost an enterprise enough to matter, though they would bankrupt small businesses.

Oddly enough, small businesses are also most likely to care about their customers enough to have ethical concerns about NSA spying.

So selection bias is definitely at work on this panel, but I doubt it's because any of the folks in question are "bought and paid for" by the NSA. They don't need to be. That's the saddest part of it all.

CONFORM. CONSUME. OBEY.

[teebie]

Re: A stacked panel of NSA flunkies

I did think the headline should have had a question mark in it, or at least quotation marks. Then we didn't have had to bother reading it to know that it just reporting that some folk said a load of unsubstantiated horsecrap.

[Anonymous Coward]

So a US company (Bloomberg) is supporting US cloud based services.

Surprising that, innit....

[Hit Snooze]

Nope

It was a panel discussing the issue at a Bloomberg tech conference, but I guess US based companies are the only companies in the world that support businesses from the same country.

Like a few others above have said, CIO's do not care about anything other than the bottom line, so it is not surprising that they are still a big GO for the cloud. Security, phhht, who needs it? The money used on security could be a new car for me and my fellow executive chums and I needz meh a new car!

[Gerardo McFitzpatrick-O'Toole]

Journalists in this sector should be mindful

of the growing number of people running browser extensions such as Cloud to Butt Plus:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/

[Anonymous Coward]

Bologna

The ONLY thing that has caused a pause in cloud adoption is the cold water in the face that Snowden's revelations were. Suddenly, emboldened that by the seemingly courageous action of one of their own (Snowden), all those "pesky IT types" came out of the woodwork to remind their bosses of how extraordinarily stupid it would be to transfer possession of all the company's data to a cloud provider that could at any moment (a) have their business, and your data, taken over by the NSA (Lavabit, almost); or (b) go bankrupt, resulting in your data going to the highest bidder (Borders). Access over the Internet? Sure, can do, in fact MUST do. Giving the keys to the Ferrari to your three-times removed cousin Bill's next door neighbor's cousin? Not so much. Now if we could just get Owncloud to properly handle mixed time zone data in caldav calendars...

[Awil Onmearse]

I'm not a "CIO"

But I take care of this shit for our small business. And we are gone. So Amazon might not miss the 40-odd (and growing) instances we had running, but as they say "many a mickle makes a muckle"

I for one am certainly not going to fuck over our clients through negligence.

[Anonymous Coward]

This story was a public service advertisement brought to you by our sponsor.

In other non US news, American tech giants are reporting declines in orders of up to 30%.

In the last quarter.

http://www.cio-today.com/news/NSA-Spying-Hurts-Hardware-Sales/story.xhtml?story_id=101006N0G2RU