If you hadn’t heard of Ashley Madison before a couple weeks ago, it probably means you’re a decent person — the match-making website’s sole purpose was to connect married people looking to have an affair. The website made headlines recently after a hacking group stole then shared user account names and details for all the world to see.
While it might be hard to feel bad for cheating spouses who suddenly have their transgressions publicly aired, hacking of this magnitude does bring into question the security of information stored or shared digitally.
Related post: This cloud has a silver lining: cloud storage for the farm
The benefits of using cloud storage and computing for everything from family photos to field records are numerous, to say the least, and security is actually one of them — having your all-important data backed up several times over is much safer than depending on one hard drive in the office. What’s more, storing data in a cloud makes it accessible from several devices or anywhere in the world.
But data, images and financial records stored “out there somewhere” does mean it could be accessed or shared by others. If you do use cloud storage or data-management programs and services there’s also the bigger question of hammering out who can access, use or benefit from said data.
Which brings us to this week’s Thumbs up, Thumbs down question — do you worry about the security of your farm-data on cloud based storage? If you don’t use cloud-based sharing yet, is security part of why you don’t?
