3 Reasons the Cloud is More Secure Than You Think

6 weeks to Salesforce Nirvana

When you are in the cloud business (as we are) you get used to people making some pretty bold statements about scalability, agility, cost and all the other miracles that are supposed to come with “moving to the cloud.” However one thing that I think goes unmentioned often times is that enhanced security may be something that comes along with a move to the cloud. Despite the fact that security is among the biggest worries for new clients moving to the cloud, I think security is often enhanced when you move to the cloud. I’m going to base the following statements on the Salesforce model so please don’t think what I say here applies everywhere but I think some of the same concepts apply. Here are three reasons why:

1. Nobody wants to be on the front page of the Washington Post for the wrong reason. In the case of a FedRamp approved vendor like Salesforce that provides a “walled garden” approach to development in the cloud in the way AOL did for the internet so many years ago the cloud is truly a safer place. This is because Salesforce enforces strict security policies for development on all of its tenants. After all if MB&A makes a serious mistake in the way we build an application on the platform we may be in the story but Salesforce will be the headline.

2. All the solutions are built on one solution. Cloud platform vendors like Salesforce that have a consistent infrastructure, patching, and security model based on economies of scale and a relatively homogenous IT environment are easier to secure. Even when you do almost 2 billion transactions a day across 130,000 clients like Salesforce you still can have less complexity within your infrastructure than are involved in a place like the Department of Agriculture with more than 700 systems each with its own infrastructure, support contractors, and other unique elements.

3. They are watching the big picture and the little picture at the same time. At salesforce you can always go to trust.salesforce.com and see how the platform is performing across the platform. In fact because of their size and scale when Salesforce is watching its tenants in the cloud it is watching the big picture enabling it to meet the evolving security landscape. Also, because of the Salesforce community which enables customers across the platform to interact and share information issues that might not see the light of day are vetted by the entire community helping create a safer platform for all.

I’d love to tell you that we built ExAM4Government.com and ExAM4Inspections.com on the platform because of the security but we did it primarily on the basis of its many features from being natively mobile to scalability to affordability. The security angle is something we really came to appreciate after the fact. Now with FedRamp and the many security concerns that government customers have we are glad we made that decision. If you are interested in learning how we can help you move your Service Cloud or Salesforce platform implementation along in six weeks check out our offer at: info.mbaoutcome.com/salesforce/ if you are interested in how we help public sector clients manage inspections, compliance, risk and forms check out: try.exam4inspections.com/demo/