Security is still a big concern for many companies exploring the option to move some IT services or applications to the cloud. A survey this month by GFI found that one in four small businesses cite security as an issue that prevents them from adopting a cloud-based or hosted service. This concern is justified to an extent.

I would argue that cloud service providers have invested a lot of money to build their infrastructure. They understand how the financial and reputational losses associated with data breaches and downtime can be detrimental to their business. In order to be able to offer services that will be acceptable to their customers, they invest much time and money into the application or service they provide to their customers – an investment that is far beyond what small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can dream of being able to afford – and why should they? Cloud providers have data centres, multiple layers of security including physical security measures, redundancy, backups, round-the-clock support and so on. Certainly, a lot more defense-in-depth that your average SMB has.

Therefore, SMBs should feel confident that cloud services vendors are now doing everything in their power to protect clients’ data, including implementing a layered approach to security with firewalls and other solutions that secure sensitive information and prevent data breaches, and offering the highest levels of redundancy and reliability to ensure clients can access their data 24/7 from any location.

At the end of the day, it all depends on how comfortable the client is with migrating the data to third parties offering hosted or cloud-based servers but the safeguards in place with any substantial provider are well tried and tested.