Director of information services and security at Wolfson Microelectronics, Andrew Ralston, railed against cloud services providers on a panel at the Infosecurity Europe conference today.
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In a discussion about maintaining data security in the supply chain when working with cloud providers, Ralston revealed that his company avoids the cloud because "we don't trust cloud providers".
Speaking later to Computing, Ralston registered surprise at the willingness of his fellow panellists, including The Post Office's head of information security, Mark Pearce, to trust cloud providers with critical data and services.
"Knowing where your resources are is getting harder," Pearce had said earlier. "It's a constant battle to know exactly where your data resides, and to make sure that agreements you've put in place are kept to."
In response, Ralston told Computing:
"I'm responsible for information systems and information security within my organisation, and I like to have a clear control over my responsibilities.
"What I'm finding with cloud suppliers is; you don't actually have that control. You can't speak to the likes of Amazon or Google, because they don't actually speak to anyone. You go to the website, and you can't actually do anything with the terms and conditions. You can read them, you can sign up, and that's it. It's take it or leave it."
Ralston added that when services such as Microsoft 365 or Google Docs go down, "what they expect you to do is twiddle your thumbs until service is restored. You can't speak to anyone or shout at them if you have a problem".
Working with the likes of Nokia and Samsung on an international level, Ralston described how a "24/7" business presence is required to keep component shipping working to standard.
"So our sevices are almost entirely internally hosted," said Ralston. "We have Rackspace backing up our data, and have more outages with them than with our own systems. But when you contact them, they say they'll get it back up and running as fast as they can."
