Article: Security in the Cloud

A recent article in Fortune magazine caught my attention. It's about the cloud. It's about DLP. That's my world.

It sounds like a privacy breach waiting to happen: Take some of your company's most classified information — employee records containing Social Security numbers, salaries — and put it on a bunch of remote servers that let you access the data via the public Internet.

Yet Workday, a private, venture-backed company, is successfully getting companies such as Sony Pictures and Flextronics to move their human resources software to an Internet-based system...
For big customers, though, Workday's biggest shortcoming may be its business model: Tech officers at most large companies still harbor concerns about the security of cloud computing. (It's noteworthy that while Sony Pictures has moved to Workday, the rest of Sony's empire has not.)

Corporations maintain files on hundreds of thousands of employees and retirees, and "if you lose that data, you're in a world of trouble," says Josh Bersin, a human-resources-software analyst.