The increasing popularity of cloud-based solutions has resulted in many new offerings of cloud platforms as well as numerous as-a-service software solutions. We also have storage-as-a-service, to alleviate in-house storage demands; and even supercomputing-as-a-service. Are all of these cloud services robust enough for mainstream, daily use?

Computing is seldom a one-size-fits-all proposition, and what works for one company won’t work for another. The same is true with the cloud. What’s clear though, is that it is here to stay. There are two things that have led more companies to face the cloud question head-on: Available technology in the form of cloud services and solutions, and greater availability of cheap, high-speed connectivity; and simple economics. These two factors have converged nicely.

On the economic side, the struggling economy, and the need for more companies to maintain or improve the bottom line by cutting costs, has led to increased reliance on outsourcing. Cloud computing services can be seen as a type of outsourcing; for example, if you’re running anti-spam or another type of security, or all of your email for that matter, through a cloud-based service, then you’re no longer burdening your in-house staff with it (or if you have no in-house IT staff, your office manager, secretary, file clerk, or whoever else may have gotten tasked with it in the past). The administration, provisioning, installation, and maintenance of the physical infrastructure is handled by somebody else. Of course, none of this would even be possible were it not for ubiquitous broadband, which allows even the smallest businesses to connect to the Internet (and all of those cloud services) at incredibly high speeds and with increasing reliability.

The most obvious time when in-the-cloud security is appropriate, is when your company doesn’t have in-house security-specific expertise. Is security being tasked to an IT generalist, or worse, to a non-IT office manager? In the case of small companies, these tasks often get delegated to the office guy who “seems to know a lot about computers” rather than a real IT person, and the result is often disastrous. The advantage to cloud services in this case is that cloud providers tend to employ experts with relevant experience. Those experts can be expensive to hire on your own, but by using the cloud services, you benefit from their expertise without having to pay their full-time salaries.

If your company is considering cloud-based security services, or any cloud service for that matter, the first thing to consider is the reliability of the company. Cloud-based security services are best offered by a company that is well-versed and experienced in security, and has been in business for some time. Second, take a good look at the service level agreement and make sure it has very specific details about performance promises. And lastly, realize that cloud security, like any type of security, while it should be easy to use, is never meant to be a “deploy it and forget it” proposition. Make sure it has good reporting facilities and an intuitive management portal that still affords you some control over the security features.