Why People Still Fear Data Breaches In The Cloud

As part of a panel discussion at the Trust in the Digital world summit in Vienna, Head of Security for the engineering group of TU Darmstadt Stefan Katzenbeisser spoke about why customers still fear data theft.

Many people today are asking the questions: Can we trust cloud providers? Should we be worried about data theft?

There are obviously some conflicting views. If you ask Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, the founder of Facebook, he'll say "If people share more, the world will become more open and connected. And a world that's more open and connected is a better world."

On the other hand, many people fear data breaches. If you Google "Facebook data theft" then you get over 60 million hits.

I think privacy concerns are something that a lot of people care about, and that's something we shouldn't ignore.

Since Edward Snowden's revelations, we learnt that most intelligence services are doing their best to learn as much about our lives as possible. They have enormous resources, and extremely powerful mining tools to record this data. Today, it's pretty certain that if you make a click on the Internet, it will be stored by NSA or the GCHQ at least for a couple of days.

There's this holy grail of outsourced data being stored in the cloud, or solutions based on trusted computing and data controls. But this comes of course at the cost initial hardware required by the cloud providers.

Is this something that customers want? Is this something we're just making up in our environment?

Do we have to even care? Will the cloud hype pass? Perhaps in a few years we won't even be talking about cloud – but my hunch is that this isn't true.

The Trust in the Digital World conference runs from 7-8 April, and ITProPortal will be covering the ins and outs of what's being discussed here in the Austrian Chamber of Commerce.