Cloud computing: don't put all your eggs in one basket

We have all the heard the maxim ‘don't put all your eggs in one basket’ but what does it have to do with cloud computing?

Nearly every single IT support company in the country is offering the latest craze of cloud computing to the masses and, lest you accuse me of shooting myself in the foot, I do have a cloud division of my company, albeit not conventional cloud computing.

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Is technology moving too quickly to be secure?

Mainstream computers have only been around for around thirty years but businesses, consumers, hardware manufacturers and software vendors appear to be trying to make the humble (and relatively new) desktop computer defunct.

Back in the 1980s, the desktop didn't really exist but secure, stable, speedy, albeit unfriendly, giant mainframe computers did exist. Unfriendly they may have been, but at least they were simple, secure and stable.

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Traditional approaches to antivirus will fail for home and small-business users

Ask the average home user or small business how they defend themselves from internet nasties and the typical response is: ‘We use freebie antivirus programs’. Let’s jump to the “real” world and ask if they would use a standard police constable to guard their home from burglars, their yacht from pirates or themselves from kidnappers while doing business in Iraq. The answer is ‘no’. A police constable can do a good job guarding a house but lacks the skills and experience to guard a yacht from maritime pirates or protect a person from armed kidnappers in Iraq.

Each situation requires separate training, experience, equipment and insurance – and the situation is very similar with antivirus. Viruses can enter through various avenues, mainly websites, email or physically (USBs & CDs/DVDs). Each avenue uses different tricks and complexities, with web malware being the favourite entry method of the twenty-tens. That’s not to say that viruses are no longer delivered through USBs, CDs and emails, but the true payload today is often web-based and one product alone cannot be 100 per cent accurate.

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