Murray Martin, the CEO of Pitney Bowes, feels that security in the cloud is just as good as what one has behind the traditional firewall. Moreover, the cloud may make your company more flexible. "You can secure your data by encrypting it on the transmission up to the cloud, while it's in the cloud and back down to your own systems," he says.
So having your systems on someone else's servers won't make you less likely to respond to changes in the market?
"Actually, I think it's the opposite. It makes you more flexible. It's not that different than outsourcing components. You're moving to an outsourcing provider that has more capacity and more expertise in a segment than you have. So if I have a room with a rack of servers in it, why is that better than a campus of racks that is backed up by another campus in real time? The cloud provider has new equipment that's been upgraded. I think you can gain more flexibility, more scalability and more variability than in the old model."
