Is using the cloud safe?
Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. I
don't want to say that this is a question I get often.
I kind of wish I got it because I'd give them this answer.
What I get instead are the contrary opinions that basically say after almost
any breach, this is why you shouldn't use the cloud.
This is why the cloud cloud is inherently unsafe.
There's a lot of misunderstanding behind
that sentiment and I want to address a couple of them because I honestly
believe that not only is the cloud safe, it can be used safely.
Avoiding it actually sometimes makes you less safe and certainly keeps you
from using your technology to its fullest extent.
First of all, we have to understand just what it means to be the cloud.
The cloud, the term is nothing more than marketing.
Honestly, it's a marketing term that means nothing more than online services.
Online services that we think of as things
like OneDrive or dropbox places to store files for example,
are probably the canonical example of storing things in the cloud.
Or password managers that store a copy of your encrypted vault in the cloud so
that you could use it from multiple different computers.
That's the cloud.
However, it's way more than that,
and I point that out specifically because it's nothing new really.
The cloud using online services is something you and I have been doing
for decades, much longer than the term has even existed.
Again, the canonical example of the way
you and I have been using the cloud for decades is email.
Email is a cloud based service.
Not only is your email traveling from one place to another across these online
services, if you use webmail,
if you use something like Hotmail or Outlook.com or@gmail.com, or Yahoo.
And you're using the web interface, you are using the cloud.
Your email is stored in the cloud.
It's nothing new, it really isn't.
So is it dangerous?
Well, I will claim that the average online
service has become safer as service providers have responded to breaches
and hopefully learned from their mistakes over time.
If anything has changed, it's the number of services that are available to us.
And yeah, it does seem like I'll call it the newer service providers,
the folks that are new to what we're doing online,
they tend to have to learn and sometimes they end up having to learn the hard way.
Sometimes things change, businesses change, ownership and priorities change.
But the bottom line is that most of the services that you and I talk about
using on a daily basis google services, Microsoft Services, Yahoo.
Others, these are all mature services
that have proper security in place and are doing things.
However, we do have to point out that yeah, these services
are and always have been staffed by humans and we make mistakes.
Sometimes 20 years ago that meant someone
might gain access to an email account that they weren't supposed to gain access to.
Are we not using email because of that? Of course not.
We're all using email heavily.
So when something like that happens,
we hope that the service is learning from the mistake and making themselves better.
That holds true for email 20 years ago.
It holds true for anything you might consider to be a cloud service today.
Honestly, the biggest risk to your usage of cloud services is you.
No one can protect you from yourself.
One of the examples that I use
in the companion article for this video is the Matt Honen hack of a few years ago.
He actually watched and documented as his
accounts were hacked and how he ended up losing data as a part of that hack.
The issue was not, and he will actually stell you this
the issue was not that he didn't want to use cloud services anymore.
He believes in them as strongly, if not more so after the hack than before.
No, the reason he lost data, he wasn't backed up.
You will admit this, the stuff he had online was only online.
So that when online went away.
Yeah, it went away.
Now, the other thing that is very concerning to people is they are concerned
that their information placed into cloud storage of any sort,
be it email or file storage, is somehow accessible to other people.
Two things on this.
One is with respect to email, again,
I keep saying this, it has always been this way.
Yes.
Whoever it is that manages your email server, be it me, because I happen to run
a server, or Microsoft or Google, because they happen to run the servers,
technically they have access to your email.
If you don't trust them with that access, don't use them.
It's that simple.
But the problem is that they can sometimes
be compelled to give access to others, for example, law enforcement.
And that's true for your email,
for the files you store in cloud storage and so forth.
The solution, of course,
is encryption tools like cryptometer or other solutions that you might do using
seven zip or VeraCrypt or other encryption tools.
That's how you protect your data in the cloud.
With those kind of encryption tools in place, no one,
no one can actually access the contents of your files other than you.
And to be honest, this is where email,
as long as it's been around, is still kind of failing to meet the mark.
Encrypting email,
storing email in an encrypted form turns out to still be really difficult.
It's not difficult to do, but it's difficult to do Pragmatically
because there's no real good common standard and way of making it happen.
When it comes to tools like
OneDrive Dropbox cloud storage services, there are a number of solutions that all
work well and all work to keep your data secure.
But it is an additional step that you then
need to take for the data you consider to be most important or at risk.
And I have to say yes, back it up anyway.
No matter how secure you think things are, anything can happen at any time.
And on top of all of that, it's still on you to keep your account secure.
That means strong passwords, two factor authentication,
making sure your recovery information is present and up to date.
The litany of things that we talk about
often using cloud services, can be done safely.
It simply takes an intention on your part to do so.
It does mean choosing providers that you're willing to trust,
and for those things you think are particularly sensitive to take
that additional level of encrypting it yourself using tools like cryptometer.
Hope that helps allay a little bit of the fear.
For comments, for updates, for links related to this topic,
and a little bit more of a discussion on the example that I talked about.
Matt honan visit.
AskLeo.com/5701 I'm Leo. Notenboom.
This is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.