The Garage Versus the Safe

By Ron Daly

I have a garage attached to my house. There’s a door that slips into the kitchen and a workbench, and just enough space for my two cars.

I keep just about everything in there. There’s the lawnmower, the tennis rackets and basketballs, the garbage cans…all the stuff that typically belongs in the garage.

The garage does its job and does it well; when you have to store something you can’t keep in the house for space reasons, you throw it in the garage. There are a few things however I would never keep in the garage. I wouldn’t keep my daughter’s birth certificate in a box of old Christmas decorations. I wouldn’t keep my mortgage paperwork in a drawer in my work bench. I wouldn’t keep my will under an old oil pan.

There’s a better place for all of those documents. It’s called a safe. Sure, a safe has less storage space. But space isn’t the only concern. There’s security to consider. How safe can you keep a document in a space that stays open most of the day? That nearly anyone can access? But what would happen if the garage (and the house) burned down? I can count on the fireproof safe to keep all those documents in good condition until after the fire dies.

I’d never confuse the garage and the safe.

So why am I telling you this? It’s simple and convenient today to store and access applications, files and data in the cloud. But is it as secure as it needs to be? Cloud providers design their services to meet electronic storage and file-sharing needs – and they do it very well – for its intended purpose.

continue reading »