If you ask the person sitting beside you on an airplane if they’re scared, they’ll probably admit that they are, at least a little bit. Ask the same question to people in cars, you’ll find few that are scared and even fewer willing to admit it. How can this be true when the facts state that travelling by car is far more dangerous than flying? Just as most humans have an irrational fear of flying through the clouds, some have an irrational fear of cloud-based services or data-storage.
There is a misconception among many companies that cloud computing is less secure than keeping their infrastructure in-house. In fact, if properly designed and managed, a private or public cloud environment offers a more secure infrastructure than most in-house solutions.
“I don’t think the market as a whole does a good job at communicating the fact that there are standards and policies in place that help secure the cloud,” said Cloud Security Alliance founder Dennis Hurst in a recent report on cloud computing. “In reality, there are cloud services out there that are far safer than someone’s own IT infrastructure.”
Many companies trying to do business in today’s world don’t have the funds available or know-how to produce a secure internal infrastructure and why should they have to? Companies will always be better at their core skills (be it publishing books, selling cars or running nightclubs) then they will be at building and managing the systems and data.
A company who fails to trust the security of cloud computing must resort to finding someone internally to build what they think is a safe infrastructure. That infrastructure will inevitably lag behind the emerging standards because of the expensive hardware and specialized personnel it takes to keep up to speed on the latest technologies and approaches. Which is how a huge of number of businesses end up with old and costly “legacy” platforms that don’t meet their needs and face huge capital expenditure in order to upgrade them.
Companies Telax Hosted Call Center are focused exclusively on developing cutting-edge, secure technology to meet the needs of their customers. In our case, with customers like the General Services Administration and Health Canada, offering a highly stable, totally redundant and ultra secure environment is part of our mandate. Could you say the same about a company who’s in-house call center platform is little more than a cumbersome requirement for doing business?
When Cisco produces a new firewall, companies in the business of providing cloud computing options are the first in line to review and implement that firewall. Companies with other core services and products may eventually get around to investing in a new piece of hardware, but in the meantime they’re gambling with everything they, and their customers, have. A breach in security and a database full of credit card information will not only cost money, but it will cost customer trust, something that is very difficult to win back.
The cherry on top is that cloud computing is not only a safer method, it’s also cheaper. Companies like Telax can share their costs amongst many customers, so everyone gets to enjoy new developments without having to shoulder their costs. Here’s a good example: earlier this year, we released social media integration. All of our hosted call center customers benefited from the update without having to pay for it. Any company with an in-house call center solution would have had to pay for the entire design, development and QA costs in order to achieve the same result.
Whether it be a call center solution, Microsoft’s Exchange Online, or Google Aps, the simple fact is that cloud computing is far safer and less expensive than managing a system in-house, just like putting your money in a bank is safer and less expensive than buying and maintaining your own safe.
Check out a video blog our friends at ThinkTel recently did on the resiliency of the cloud.
Tags: call center software, cloud, cloud computing, hosted call center, public sector, redundancy, social media