Strategies for Addressing Cloud Computing Insurance Risks
Cyber-Insurance and Cloud Computing Don’t Quite Yet Mix
More and more companies – both big and small – are migrating and storing their data in the cloud. While cloud computing offers benefits over traditional storage methods, such as flexibility, accessibility and capacity, cloud computing comes with its own set of data-security risks. The most high profile of these risks is the good old-fashioned data breach, which, in 2014 alone, struck such trusted household names as Target, Home Depot, Google, Neiman Marcus and JP Morgan Chase. See Bank Info Security, Infographic: 2014’s Top Breaches So Far. These breaches can also result in hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and send a publicly-traded company’s share price tumbling. See Forbes.Com, Target Shares Tumble as Retailer Reveals Cost of Data Breach. But, data breaches are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cloud-security threats. Other risks can be far less nefarious, such as a data loss, which can be the result of simple human error or negligence. For example, over one weekend in 2011, many Amazon Web Service customers lost data as AWS’s EC2 cloud suffered a “mirroring storm” due to human operator error. See InformationWeek, 9 Worst Cloud Security Threats.