Can you trust the Cloud?

As we’ve seen with Dropbox (which I love by way) it doesn’t take much for your provider to open up your files and hand them over. While I think it would naive to think that no one at Dropbox or anywhere else can’t get your files whenever they want, it does beg the question, how do you feel about completely unsecured files just sitting out there? I have no doubt access is restricted to only certain employees but we’ve seen plenty of examples of disgruntled and even slightly kooky folks getting their hands on data and spewing it all over the web. How confident are you that your personal notes, work files, payroll figures, expense reports, family photos, your first novel or whatever you store out there won’t get liberated? It’s not just pirated copies of Windows you need to be concerned with. What if some jackass decides to go searching for every .TXT, .DOC and .XLS file in the system then goes home and reads them all? Or what if someone scans through all the photos on those servers to see if there’s anything they can use? What if you stored a backup of your system on the cloud and someone decided to restore it to their own system, what would they find?

It makes you wonder who has the keys and who’s guarding the doors.