cloud, says Symantec’s Thompson.
Cloud providers currently offer
limited choices in service-level
agreements, but as more companies
ask for access to operational data
the cloud. Heartland Payment
Systems, which has recovered from
a massive breach of its systems in
2009, has set out to create its own
infrastructure-as-a-service private
“Anytime I can enable an end user to be more
productive, giving them more data and access
to data… that helps us as a company.”
davId ThOmpsON, cIO, symaNTec
and reporting, businesses should
have greater visibility into how
their data is being secured, says
Thompson.
“From our experience working
with cloud infrastructure and soft-
ware-as-a-service providers, they
have all had to standardize their
reporting,” Thompson says. “We
have audit rights and have tested
those on an annual basis and tested
our disaster-recovery processes on
an annual basis. We have multiple
layers of protection, and that has
really given us a comfort level in
terms of compliance.”
Other companies have also
taken security into their own
hands, encrypting their data in
cloud to fuel processor-hungry
internal projects and some exter-
nal services. The effort is part of
a consolidation aimed at reducing
the company’s total number of data
centers from nine to three.
