TCnbc Magazine - 17
Another solution that’s just being batted around for data privacy and cloud storage is anonymizing the data in the cloud using some type of tokened referencing system. Although the data stored in the cloud would be stored and in the clear, personal information – such as a U.S. Social Security Number or a U.K. National Insurance Number – would be stored as reference values only. Like decryption keys, the token or key used to de-reference the values of the data stored in the cloud would need to be stored and only applied to the referenced data on-premise. The resulting personal identification data would never be stored once it was de-referenced, but only used in secure transactional systems.
There’s no question that cloud storage opens up new business opportunities for organizations in many different geographies. But there’s also no question that how these new technologies are used and where they are located is going to impact the decision on outsourcing data storage to the cloud. When data is moved beyond an organization’s technological and geographic borders, the organization runs the risk of losing control of how that data complies with regulatory compliance. By addressing legal and regulatory challenges up front through technology, an organization can begin architecting an off-premise, cloud-based storage solution that meets the business’s needs as well as keeps regulatory compliance at bay.