Don't put your data in the Cloud, Mrs Worthington

Story of the day is the hacking of emails and other documents from Twitter's systems. Now the big hullabaloo is the ethics of what to publish, but we think the real lesson is that if you store your data in The Cloud, you are far more at risk from these sort of occurrences.

As the BBC notes in its coverage:

But companies thinking of migrating all of their e-mail into the cloud might consider what Hacker Croll [The guy who hacked the Twitter systems] told Manuel Borne about the motivation behind his Twitter hack:

"J'espere que mon intervention leur fera prendre conscience que nul n'est a l'abri sur le net."

In other words, he hopes his "intervention" will make Twitter wake up to the fact that nothing is secure on the net. Companies promoting cloud computing - from Google to Amazon to Microsoft - are all confident that their systems just cannot be hacked.

But if you allow your employees - including very senior members of staff - to send confidential information on cloud-based e-mail then you'd better make sure their passwords are super secure.

Especially if its free, as we have noted before the only Service Level at zero cost is zero service, and that if you ain't paying, you ain't the customer. The server's priority is elsewhere, not on you as the client

Update - a number of people have pointed out to me that this was more of a man in the middle problem (see here) but I do think there is more chance of it happening in low budget cloud services than in owned infrastructure.