'The Cloud' is just 'Someone Elses Computer'. Would you process confidential documents on 'Someone Elses Computer'?
The bigger mistake was made before this data breach even happened.
The bigger mistake was made before this data breach even happened.
Only when losing customer information equals to revenue drops, company will take security more seriously. Enforcing a law to company storing customer to have common security practice is a possible solution, though it hurts low budget startup.
Keeping your data on cloud introduces new attack vendors. It closes others.
If you're going to be an idiot[2][3], and host a production database which doesn't require any authentication on the cloud, I don't have much hope for your non-cloud-deployed security.
[1] For most reasonable definitions of every.
[2] I have had the dubious pleasure of working in a ~15 year-old software company where ~half of the machines were virus-infested (Mostly Conficker, but also some other shit that I forget. This was in 2012. If I recall correctly, we had one part-time IT guy for ~30 engineers. His job was ordering computer parts, and keeping e-mail working. The health of the dev machines was not his problem.) The SOP was to do all your work in a VM running Windows XP, and wipe it every few weeks, or whenever performance would grind to a halt - whichever came first. One of my tasks, a few months in, was to deal with the virus situation on the build server, so that we could 'securely' build the release, and sign it with the encryption key that only the VPs had access to.
[3] I have also had a chance to work in a company obsessed with security (Because of the nature of their products). One of my discoveries, a few months before I left, was that one of their products' updates were pushed via an insecure HTTP downloader. While I was there, nobody budgeted time to get it fixed.
If it's a big megacorp like Google or Microsoft, and I don't consider myself a target for state-level actors, easy.
However, the customers that uploaded sensitive documents to this cloud OCR service did not have control of the computers, the code, or the configuration.
Yes, if you don't trust anyone you can't get anything done but this feels like the kind of task where you should be a little bit nervous each time you do it.