Folks, I have a demo SQL database in Azure and it's working nicely, but now we have to consider how to get it into production use. My demo DB doesn't contain any real names and addresses, but the live DB will have information about hospital patients, and you can imagine how confidential that is! I'm told they will demand the DB be stored on hospital managed servers, which is a damn nuisance in reality as I'm sure many of you know how tedious it can be trying to break through walls of bureaucracy around IT departments in places like hospitals and the government.
This opens up the whole issues of "trust and the cloud". Since the Snowden revelations, I don't know how anyone with confidential data can trust cloud storage. Even I don't trust it and all of my backups in Rackspace and Azure blobs are pkzipc AES encrypted. So how on earth could a hospital be convinced that cloud store is an attractive option? I just remembered that Amazon has a special area that is certified secure so they can get government contracts. I haven't seen anything like that in Azure. Despite that, it doesn't make me feel much better, as we now know the NSA was intercepting hardware and bugging it, and coercing huge telcos to put splitters in the backbones, and using secret FISA orders to threaten other even huger companies to secretly hand over their records. So who the hell can trust anyone in the cloud?! Is anyone dealing in this sort of cloud/trust business at the moment? What's the state of play? is there any hope? Am I just paranoid? (who's monitoring this email?) *Greg K*
