I have written about the security issues of holding data in the cloud on a number of ocassions, both in this blog and on various forums.  it is an emotive topic, with some people completely chilled about the idea, others very worried about issues ranging from their data being hacked by competitors, data being lost or corrupted, data being accessed by various government agencies and so on.  I have felt for a while (and argued in this blog post) that much of this fear was not entirely rational (still valid of course, but just not warranted based on the facts). 

Today I came across an interesting survey from the UK on this topic that very strongly suggests that this really is one of those classic "fears of the unknown".  Once people overcome that initial fear and investigate this a little further their experiences are overwhelmingly positive.  Based on these positive experiences and a better understanding of the risks involved their concerns about the cloud change dramatically.

The survey looked at levels of concern about cloud security and privacy, compared to the respondents current experience with cloud apps.  Looking at the graphs below we see a very clear trend of those with significant experience rating cloud / Saas as better or no different, whilst those with limited or no experience perceive the risks on both these measures as being far higher.




It is of course important to note that not all Saas providers have an equally good record on either security or privacy.  There have been some well documented breaches of security / privacy in the cloud, but equally many in-house businesses have been broken into, had data hacked, lost records through breaches of security and so on.  And many cloud apps have an exemplary record.   Once again I find myself coming to the conclusion that I know where I believe my data is safest!