Recently Steve Jobs revealed the next big thing from Apple: iCloud. The sales pitch? It’s a state-of-the-art, seamless way to upload iTunes, photos and other personal documents to some magical, mysterious hard drive in the sky. So if you have been frazzled in your attempts to sync your iPhone, iPad and iEtcetera to your iMac, those days are over. In other words, as Mr. Jobs made abundantly clear, MobileMe ain’t cutting it. Best of all, unlike Apple’s almost nearly extinct $99-a-year MobileMe subscription service, the iCloud is totally free. So what’s not to like? Plenty.
For instance, the many security concerns that comes with having your most personal information housed in some ether-like cloud thingy. It is like putting up a neon sign that says “hackers, come and get it.” So how does Apple avoid being the next big target of wild-eyed cyber crooks pirating and plundering our lives? How does Apple prevent the iCloud from becoming the next Sony PlayStation fiasco? Nobody knows for sure. But you can bet that corporate IT departments from Dallas to Dublin are devising ways to wall off sensitive corporate data from being tossed into some wispy cloud vapor. So here are a few ideas from our branding agency to your IT guys.
Recommit yourself to good password protocol. It is never a good idea to use your pet Labrador’s name as your password for everything. Mix it up and change passwords every few months. Great advice, huh? (Yeah, I know. I won’t be doing that either. But don’t tell our IT guy.)
The second thought is 2-part authentication. This idea gets very James Bondian. In addition to a name and password login, add a second step of authentication like a retina scan or––wait for it––finger print identification software.
I know, awesome, right? Cloud services from Apple to Microsoft may be the next big idea, but we need to be very careful about what information we store there. After all, clouds have been known to burst.
