Earlier this week, I attended the Entrepreneur Country Forum at The Royal Institute of Great Britain in London. These events give the entrepreneurs a great opportunity to meet like-minded individuals and thrive off the energy of others in similar situations to themselves or learn from the vast experience shared by the speakers and panellists for the day such as Austin Healey talking about the value of people, and Will King founder of King of Shaves discussing social media as a business accelerator. The perverse amongst them paid for the privilege of pitching their business idea’s to a couple of Dragons with the serious objective of securing funding from Ariadne Capital whilst the panel discussions created some debate.
Format for this EC Forum worked well with a live twitter feed over the heads of the presenters displaying the audience thoughts and comments. It was whilst listening to the panel discussing ‘The Birth of the Digital Office’ that I got into conversation over the twitter feed with another attendee, @therealsabian
It’s a topic that really does fuel opposite schools of thought when it comes to digital offices and the Cloud, the topic of data security. Data security has been an issue since the first byte of data existed and it is not a new phenomenon associated with the Cloud. Yet when cloud is discussed, data security is always raised, often above all cloud benefits as its darker side that pulls the cloud down from being a fantastic enabler to something more akin with an annoying problem that nobody can solve.
This isn’t true and small businesses should embrace the Cloud for what it stands for, freedom to work flexible, where your customers want you, where your work/life balance needs you, where your balance sheet can afford you. Via the Twitter feed, I drew a comparison to cloud security being no worse, possibly more secure than the security of carrying your data around all day on a device such as a laptop or smart-phone.
Your data here in most people’s circumstances is just a password away from being vulnerable.
@therealsabian disagreed, tweeting back on the screen above the panel as they discuss this very topic.
Sometimes, it seems that human nature pushes us to put up barriers when we are faced with something different, something we are unaccustomed to and this I believe is why we sometimes get over zealous regards data security in the Cloud. In the Cloud with any reputable supplier, it is encrypted; password protected and backed up at a mirror site by technicians whose salaries alone might break the average small business IT budget. The risks here are minimal in comparison to sole locating your data locally. Misplacing your smart-phone, having your laptop stolen or having your networked server in your home office or small office hacked in to and all too real a threat to a small business. Only a few brave business owners would be in a strong enough position to counter-argue that, or the really risk of fire, flood, physical break-in’s or even user-error.
It was then, as I was mulling over my response to @therealsabian to reinforce my view; that I looked around the room, wondering who this person was. I smirked on the outside when I realised he was sitting just two seats away from me, entering his password in to his laptop and viewing his data on the screen of his Asus. I reiterate my believe today: The biggest vulnerability when it comes to data security isn’t so much where it is stored, it always has been and continues to be the people that access it!
