Bring Your Own Cloud

The phenomenon of "Bring Your Own Device", where companies allow their people to connect their own personal devices to the company networks, is getting to be old hat. More and more companies are making the leap and finding ways to adopt their security policies appropriately.

Now some are touting a "new" trend, although one could argue it just goes along with the BYOD trend. That's the idea of Bringing Your Own Cloud.

BYOC comes from the fact that many people use their personal devices in the cloud. Two examples are iPhones and iPads being used with iCloud. In fact that's the default storage area for them. Ams there are also services like Dropbox, which is very popular for storage as well as backup.

The issue of course is security. There's a widespread assumption, not without merit, that it is more difficult to establish an adequate measure of security over the cloud than over internal servers. Certainly it raises additional issues, which in turn raises the cost of security.

Here's an article on the subject.