Francis Cronje, InfoSeal

IT governance and risk related to cloud security, interception and monitoring has become critical in the wake of the Prism scandal, said InfoSeal CEO Francis Cronje at the ITWeb 2014 governance and risk compliance conference.

“Edward Snowden" rel=tag>Edward Snowden’s revelations about Prism, a surveillance data mining program used by the National Security Agency to force Internet companies to turn over their data, has resulted in 70% of key decision makers becoming sceptical of cloud providers across the globe,” explained Cronje. “57% also stated that they are less likely to use the public cloud as a result.”

Cronje cited additional reactions that have filtered through to government levels, with German chancellor Angela Merkel proposing a European communications network be built to help improve data protection and the French government seemingly backing this initiative. “Despite companies reacting strongly to the NSA scandal, many companies say that they don’t fully understand current data laws, with 60% admitting they don’t know as much as they should about data privacy laws. Similarly, 44% are confused by privacy and security laws,” said Cronje.

Furthermore, 77% stated that they would rather host their data in a highly secure, but latent facility than in a facility that guarantees top speeds but is less secure.

For a way forward if companies are going to interact with the cloud, Cronje advised that data privacy laws of countries where data will be hosted should be one of the key factors when companies select a cloud service provider.