Dangers of Email in the Cloud – Who’s Accessing Your Private Data?

People love getting things for free.  Companies love to save money on essential services.  As a result, many people are using free cloud email services, and many companies are using inexpensive cloud email services.  Have you ever read the contracts very closely, though?  Usually, you have no recourse if your data becomes compromised.  One mischievous system administrator can look for valuable information across all the mailboxes, and sell that information about you.  Your company data is on one server, but that server is actually virtualized, and is on the same hardware as many other companies’ data.  One break-in on the physical server can compromise the data for all the companies that had data on that server.  Your competitor could gain access to your confidential information!  Perhaps you have nothing to hide, but people and companies still would rather proper legal notification and procedures are used when a government agency wants access to their data.  Storing the data in a third party cloud allows governments to access your data without your knowledge!  Keeping your data in-house is by far the safest solution, but how do you do all the things the cloud provider can do, and still keep costs down?  Our Messaging Architects (for which I am one of) specialize in architecting email infrastructures for large companies. We can help you determine the best architecture given your business and legal requirements.  In many cases you can take advantage of the cloud. For example, many enterprises feel comfortable outsourcing the AV/AS filtering function to the cloud, while others take it a step further and outsource the groupware/mailbox function.  One thing is true for all large enterprises though-a hybrid infrastructure with an on-premises SMTP email backbone is required.   Ask us about our Messaging Architecture Review Program and check out this (PDF) paper on moving email infrastructure to the cloud.