NZ Payroll Community

Everyone knows that clouds bring change and clouds in the world of technology are no different.  But clouds bring many different things in both the virtual world and the real world and come in many different shapes, colours and speeds.  Some clouds rush in and drop everything they have in 5 minutes before clearing off and leaving the sun to shine as though nothing ever happened while others hang around for ages and water the garden so you don’t have to.

Cloud computing has been around for a few years and the most common and well know form is internet based email.  Anyone can use it and you don’t even have to own a computer, just a $2 coin and an internet cafe allow you to connect.  An entire industry was set up around cloud email and the worst coffee you can buy anywhere (even worse than bus stations).

At the other extreme is what is known as hosted solutions with a high number of organisations offering to run your company or personal systems for you.  Not just email but your financials, CRM’s, Payroll and operational systems.  Systems and information that organisations historically held internally and never even allowed external access through closely guarded security systems are now being hosted publicly on the internet.

So what has changed?  We all know that technology advances very quickly.  Estimates of technology doubling in effectiveness and speed every 6-8 months are scary but accurate.  But surely if systems and security is advancing this fast then the bad guys will be keeping up to?  So why trust your systems on a publicly facing system?  It’s Simple.  Not everyone is keeping up.  There are a huge number of targets for the hackers and criminals in the cyber world so why bother to hack hard to find and access systems when they have millions of poorly secured systems to play with.

System administrators are getting smarter too.  Most systems the bad guys can’t even see and neither can you, unless you fulfil all the criteria including passwords, usernames and sometimes even using one specific computer on one specific network.  But what about the exposed systems such as Google, Twitter, Sales Force and Facebook for example?  Well you can’t really hide them can you?  Well yes and no.  Some of the internet hosted solutions do restrict access to their systems from specific users and networks but most don’t and cannot without compromising usability.

These cloud applications suffer from attacks all the time.  The huge players such as Google and Microsoft are being attacked continuously from many different hacking groups around the world.  They solve the problem with money.  Buying better and more hardware than the people trying to damage them.  Other smaller players such as Twitter are not so lucky.  They don’t have an endless supply of money or hardware to stop the cyber-crims from getting to them and have been beaten a number of times on the past few months, shutting their systems down and preventing their users from enjoying their currently free systems.

It is all about risk when you look at cloud solutions.  There are many different kinds of clouds and many different forms to consider.  Consider what is right for you and when you look into what you want and need and what risk you are prepared to take.  The cloud is here to stay and no strong wind is going to blow it away.  Enjoy what it brings!

Tags: Cloud Computing, PayGlobal