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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

The author is overlooking one major flaw in his discussion: security (and possibly also reliability). His implication is that they can run internal servers more securely than Google and Salesforce. While government collection of encrypted emails is problematic, securing your own server and making it reliable is an entirely different issue. Unless they have an absolutely top notch security team they'd be better off on someone else's servers.

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This is perhaps true where budget is severely constrained, or where Windows servers are spec'd, or where developers do systems administration, or where the corporate culture won't pay for capable IT.

Experienced IT staff can typically exceed the uptime of Google and Salesforce on a standard budget with no special accommodation. Perhaps the organization's IP (intellectual property) wasn't really worth that much, or upper management forced their hand? Sounds like that wasn't the case but you never really know.

When your provider is forced by their government to just hand over your data, security is pretty much irrelevant. Anything is more secure than that.

The problem this, and many articles are missing: it isn't that the gov is taking the data from the cloud providers' servers. It's that the gov is mirroring all internet traffic and backing it all up.Thus they don't have to gain access to a cloud provider... let alone to a closet server, to get your traffic/emails.

No, not true. There are government and non-government attacks. Even if we assume cloud services are more vulnerable to government snooping, we need to also consider that many more companies and individuals suffer more damage from regular criminal hackers than from the NSA. Avoiding a small risk by increasing your exposure to a large risk is not rational.

Generally this is a good point but I think it's not relevant in this case. The author of discussed article claims that they do business with governments and the knowledge that US government can access their data just by asking their provider to give it to them is not some 'small risk' that you might want to accept to avoid something worse - it's a deal breaker. Expose yourself like that and you have no business.

Our IT team, though small, is very good at what they do and extremely focused on security. We install machines on customer floors that run 24.7.365, which themselves are remotely monitored and serviced. Security is important to us from a manufacturing standpoint as well as from an operational standpoint.

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