As more and more companies migrate to the cloud as a means to reduce their IT costs, they are creating new malware-based and cybercrime risks to their businesses. Unless the U.S. government’s NIST Framework really works, it is possible that the cybercrime problems threatening data integrity in the cloud may outweigh benefits to using it. It is too soon to know if the NIST Framework will work.
It is hard to figure out which is growing at a faster pace — movement to the cloud or cybercrime. Cybercrime is following the data to the cloud, according to reports, to find and steal cloud data of hotel records, credit card information, and maybe even corporate secrets and the client files of lawyers.
The cloud is actually old news. The concept of managing data for business on a remote computer has been around for 50 years. It began as a college effort to make computing available to students in 1964, when Dartmouth University started a remote computing service called “time-sharing.” That service used telephone lines rather than Internet connections.