Shadowy activities in the cloud?

While the cloud offers some obvious advantages – you don't have to maintain your own storage, for example – it also has a downside. Simply put, you have no idea where your data is and who might be looking at it. The issue first arose in the electronics industry a few years ago, when software as a service (SaaS) made a brief appearance, mainly in the EDA world. Immediately, people began asking questions about where their design data would be stored and how securely. Cloud companies, understandably, distribute their operations. Data stored by them is therefore distributed. The problem is that some jurisdictions have different views on data security. Worryingly – for some – the celebrity leaks appear to have happened in the US, where data security laws are tougher than, say, in the Far East. But it goes beyond that. All of us use the cloud to store data; whether it's a repository for all your images or a back up of your home PC, your 'data' is out there – as the hacked celebrities have discovered. Perhaps we should all be encrypting our data before uploading it to an unknown location.