Barb Darrow interviews IBM’s Lance Crosby (SoftLayer CEO within IBM) and at or about time mark 27:00, asks about trusting data to U.S. based companies:
Crosby responds:
My response is protect your data against any third party — whether it’s the NSA, other governments, hackers, terrorists, whatever…” he noted. “I say let’s stop worrying about the NSA and start talking about encryption and VPNs and all the ways you can protect yourself. Yes the NSA got caught but they’re not the first and won’t be the last.
Who did Crosby omit?
Your U.S.-based vendor..
How do you protect your data from your own vendor? That’s the question that Crosby so neatly ducks.
Crosby is speaking at Structure 2014. If you are attending, be sure to ask him,
“How do we protect our data from IBM if IBM is our cloud vendor?”
In all fairness, please revise and ask the same question of other cloud vendors as well.
Today, all of your data held by a U.S.-based vendor is just one court order away from being in the possession of the United States government. Who can use it, share it with competitors, etc.
Governments who want to promote the cloud will create exempt from government process mechanisms for data centers, their owners and staff, to be free from all government requests for data.
Governments who don’t want to promote the cloud and economic growth, well, they won’t have such mechanisms.
This could be the golden moment when multi-national vendors to become truly multi-national as opposed to being surrogates for the United States government.
Quotes from and commentary based on: Why we need to stop freaking out about the NSA and get on with business.