ASCENT INDEX: CLOUD SECURITY (MAY 4 – MAY 18)

One of the most tweeted stories on the cloud so far in May has been a contributed piece on Mashable examining how cloud computing and Google products are changing a generation, namely students. It discussed how students as young as five and six are using tools such as Google Docs, and how demands from college students are driving universities to adopt Gmail as their email platform.

Users are drawn to Google Apps because of their simplicity and easy collaboration, which causes the amount of data shared and stored in the cloud to grow at an exponential rate. For IT departments, this can be a security nightmare, and a comprehensive security plan is a must to avoid data breaches.

For this reason, we are actively investing in companies that help solve this burgeoning data problem. An example is CloudLock, which specializes in protecting an enterprise’s data in Google Apps: Docs, Sites, Google+ and Google Drive. We feel cloud security is a technology sector ripe for continued growth, and today’s Ascent Index shows how much interest there is in the concept.  Here’s a closer look at the number of social mentions we saw:

In total, there were 3,656 mentions of the term “cloud security” on social networks during the May 4 – 18 timeframe, a 15 percent increase over the previous two weeks. The increase is likely partly because of study results released by Microsoft on May 15^th, which found that SMBs that relied on cloud services felt three to five times better about IT costs, IT value and IT security, than those that had not implemented cloud services.

Here are some influential tweets about the Microsoft Survey:

It will be interesting to track these mentions as more organizations entrust more of their data to the cloud. The cost savings and collaboration benefits are clear, but without appropriate security protocols in place, the cloud could be an organization’s biggest threat.