Is your marketing data safe in the cloud?
Written by Bruce Townsend
Friday, 25 March 2011 00:00
Data is the life-blood of marketing. It’s how we assess the success or failure of different campaigns. It enables us to make scientific judgments about where to invest. In the online sphere, it can even tell us which half of our advertising budget is being wasted! But how safe is yours?
Digital data is vulnerable to all kinds threats, from hardware failure to fire and theft. Do you keep regular backups of everything? You do? Excellent! Where are they?
I know of at least one person who stored their backup tapes next to their computer, and had both stolen together. The moral is to keep an offsite backup of everything that matters. Applications like Dropbox and Windows Skydrive make this easy to do, and unless your files are really huge, these solutions are relatively cheap. There’s really no excuse not to use them.
Over the last couple of years, though, there has been an increasing move towards ‘cloud computing’ – the adoption of applications that run in a web browser and store data on the internet.
Cloud computing offers significant advantages:
Responsibility for security and backup is devolved to the application provider, who will generally have multiple redundancy in their systems, ensuring continuity of service in the event of a hardware failure.
Data is accessible from any location, too, and may easily be shared by all members of a team. However, cloud computing is not bullet proof:
Information on the internet may be more accessible to hackers and corporate spies. Facebook, the most popular and well-known personal cloud app, has been besieged by criticisms over its privacy policy, but others have suffered actual security breaches, resulting in client data being compromised.
Local connection issues will leave you without access to your data,
And things can go wrong in the cloud as well. Users of the Flock social browser recently found their accounts unavailable for days on end. And thousands who rely on del.icio.us to store their bookmarks had a scare when news leaked out of Yahoo’s intention to shut it down.
In the cloud, your data is out of your hands and you are wholly dependent on a third party.
So just as you back up local data onto the web, you should seriously consider keeping a local backup of any data that’s in the cloud. Google already enables users of Google Docs to save local copies of their documents. Make sure any other cloud applications you use will allow you to do the same. Otherwise, you might discover one day that your precious data has turned to vapour.
By Bruce Townsend, ecommerce product manager and SEO specialist at Actinic. Originally published on UtalkMarketing.com.
