Cloud-Based File Sharing: What If Security Didn’t Matter?

Written by Michael Brown 1
December 3, 2013

Security is - and might always be - the top concern for companies using cloud-based file sharing. But in this article, we'll highlight some other concerns that deserve attention.

No matter what you read about the cloud – surveys, reports, articles and blogs – the top concern on the part of business decision-makers is almost always security. Will my data be safe? What happens if it gets compromised? Who has access? Who should have access? These are some of the questions that keep them up at night.

Indeed, as long as companies have the need to share sensitive files, security will always be a concern (and rightly so). But what if that concern could be magically erased? What then would keep these businesses up at night? What would become their top concern then?

We ask this question not as a hypothetical, but to rather to point that there are legitimate concerns that business leaders should have regarding the cloud that get less mindshare because of security. And what might those concerns be? Here are a few:

Public, private or hybrid? With security out of the equation, there’s a good chance that the type of cloud would be among the key considerations for business leaders (yes, we know that security plays a big part in this decision-making process). Companies and organization would spend more time figuring out which cloud option were right for their business? Should they opt for the convenience and flexibility of the public cloud? Should they choose to keep some of their data on-premise? Or should they consider a mixed approach? And once they choose a particular route, how easy would it be for them to change course?
The transition. If security were no longer a concern, more businesses would focus on preparing themselves and their organizations for the cloud transition. They would invest more time and energy into training in order to hit the ground running (while not skipping a beat). Here is a good transition scenario courtesy of midsizeinsider.com:

The key to successfully transitioning any app/service to the cloud is ensuring that downtime can be mitigated. If your email goes down for 5 hours, can you continue to do business? If your cloud hosted website also has an e-commerce function which brings in the majority of your revenue, can you stand to be down for a few hours? Of course, these questions are no different than if you had these systems/services on-site but you would have had direct control over the ‘restart’ process to get things back online. When you move to the cloud, you don’t have direct control (in most cases) over the hardware/platform to quickly get things back online and you must wait for the provider to address the issue.

Mobile. Businesses would realize the enormous (and growing) importance of mobile and BYOD, and would spend more of their time figuring out the best way to capitalize on this trend. As important as it is, mobile is sometimes seen by business as an after-thought or a nice-to-have, when in fact it might already be the most important aspect of cloud-based file-sharing.
Visibility. Most of the time, when companies say they want more visibility into their file-sharing practices, it’s said with security in mind. But if security were no longer a concern, these same decision-makers would begin to see that increased visibility has value outside the realm of security, including the status and whereabouts of critical files (e.g. whether they were properly sent or received).

As we mentioned, the concern of security is (in all likelihood) never going to go away, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other legitimate concerns for companies in the cloud.