Weekly Review: It's All About Security

One of the biggest challenges for ASPs has been to persuade customers to entrust their applications and data to an outside provider. Customers usually voice their misgivings in terms of security, seeking reassurance that their digital assets will be safe in the care of the provider.

Food for Thought

"What customers need is to know that there's a trusted, reliable authority out there that will always be a rock-solid guarantor of their identity and of their ownership rights over their digital assets." Who will be the Internet sheriff? Give us your feedback at the ASPnews Discussion Forum

For ASPs and other service providers, this has often seemed more of an emotional objection than a logical one. Most customer data centers exhibit the most elementary security lapses and fall well below the minimum standards practiced by ASPs. The majority consist of a couple of server racks in a locked room with an uninterruptable power supply and an air conditioning unit, an arrangement that hardly qualifies as a fortress.

Possession Is Nine-tenths of the Law
Nevertheless, in one important respect it is still more secure for a company to keep its servers on its own premises, whatever the physical surroundings happen to be. As long as those servers are on the premises, it's absolutely clear who they belong to. If they're stolen, or if an unauthorized outsider removes data and applications off-site, the theft is as clear as daylight to any law enforcement officer or insurance claims assessor.

In the virtual world, although it's still possible to establish legal title, it's not so clear-cut. You can't just point to the server (or to the missing space where it used to be). You have to produce documents, contracts and service-level agreements (SLAs) before you can establish that a misdemeanor has taken place.

So the nervousness that customers feel about handing over their data and applications to an outside provider is not related to security as a threat. It's more to do with the fact that ownership and title in the physical world is founded on concepts and legal rights that have been around for centuries. Whereas the virtual world is still sorting all of this stuff out.

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