The New Zealand Privacy Commissioner has released two documents designed to assist businesses who are thinking of shifting to cloud based services.
The Cloud Computing checklist for small business summarises a number of steps that small businesses should take to ensure that the privacy of data sent to the cloud is properly protected. Cloud Computing – A guide to making the right choices is a document that seeks to provide general information to assist business shifting to the cloud.
The Privacy Commissioner released the following statement with this information:
Shifting to the cloud can make good business sense, but there’s a lot to weigh up. One question that often worries businesses is whether their client and staff information will be safe if they switch to cloud services.
We’ve developed a privacy checklist to help you to answer that question. The checklist and its supporting material set out the most important privacy queries you should think about, and ask your cloud provider about.
Why does it matter? Because whether personal information is held on your own computers, in a shared datacentre in New Zealand, or offshore, you’ve got legal obligations to protect it. Also, your clients trust you to get it right – and loss of trust is loss of business. So it’s worth spending some time to think things through.