A couple of weeks ago, one of the biggest technology stories in the popular press was the introduction of Amazon’s offering of cloud-based storage of your personal music files. And note that we didn’t say “planned offering,” and it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.
It’s there, we’ve tried it, it works, and it’s cool. So this leads us to wonder what – if any – impact this might have on the corporate network. Clearly, this is attractive because your computer-based music can also reside in the cloud so you can access it via a mobile device (or your computer). And this could be extremely cool considering that our recent discussion of “How would YOU use an iPad or Tablet computer?” pretty well ended up with the conclusion that most of us will end up with a smartphone, a tablet/pad of some form, and one or many PCs.
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We’re also making the assumption that many (or most) folks like to have occasional (at a minimum) access to their personal music tastes while at work. And the closer together the cubicles are, the more desperate you are for headphones.
Several years ago, corporations were severely concerned about the amount of “corporate” bandwidth that apps like streaming music could consume. And two of the three access methods to your Amazon “cloud music” could involve the corporate net – those two being use of the corporate LAN from a wired device (a.k.a. traditional PC connection) or the corporate WLAN.
Interestingly, the addition of music really isn’t all that new. It’s good marketing for Amazon, but it’s really “just” online personal file storage. And those capabilities already exist from Google (and GoogleDocs) and from companies like LiveDrive. But this raises concerns on a couple of major concerns. On the surface, there’s the issue of corporate bandwidth and the issue of whether listening to music will contribute to congestion.
Honestly, we don’t think that’s a huge concern. With the size of today’s data pipes, it will probably fit into the cracks. As noted at the Webtorials Public Forum, “We see the abundance of personal on-line storage as a major threat to corporate security. Sure… We’ve had floppy drives, flash drives, CDs, DVDs, etc. for years. So in many ways the ability to copy possibly corrupted or confidential corporate files to/from the corporate net to personal storage is nothing new.
“However, once this storage is based in the cloud, we see a tremendous opportunity for a security risk – simply because it’s so darn easy to exploit. And there’s no physical device necessarily involved.”
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this issue. How big a risk is it, and how are you addressing it? Is policy sufficient? Does it take a more intelligent monitoring device of some form? Let’s chat about it.
