Indian Harvest Specialtifoods, a Bemidji, Minnesota-based company that distributes rice, grains, and legumes to restaurants worldwide, relies on cloud software provider NetSuite to ensure that its data sent to the cloud are fully protected. Mike Mullin, Indian Harvest’s IT director, feels that using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) to encrypt the data gives him some level of confidence that the data are secure. He also points out that his company and other users of cloud services need to pay attention to their own security practices, especially access controls. “Your side of the infrastructure is just as vulnerable, if not more vulnerable, than the provider’s side,” he observes.
One way to deal with these problems is to use a cloud vendor that is a public company, which is required by law to disclose how it manages information. Salesforce.com meets this requirement, with strict processes and guidelines for managing its data centers. “We know our data are in the U.S. and we have a report on the very data centers that we’re talking about, “says Flax.