Cloud data security

to increase the trust of the customers

• store as little as you need

• if possible, offload some responsibilities to the client side

• use least privilege principle

• encrypt sensitive data at rest

• back-up regularly

• ensure correct restore from back-ups regularly

Data security is not entirely reliant on your software, and where it's not there's not much you can do.

What you can do is make sure you keep up with installing the latest security updates on your server and make sure you don't provide any holes in your software for intruders to get in.

One of the ways I'm working on to increase "trust" is offering users choices on where their data is stored. For example, the apps I'm working on allow users to store the data only on the computer or mobile device they're using the software on. Of course, this doesn't provide the benefits of using "Cloud" based software, but that's a user's choice.

I also offer 3rd party data services as an option. In my case users can choose to use my Cloud Data services, IBM Cloudant services, or Couchbase.

Another is offering users a hardware option to run the app server in-house. With this option they can configure the server to be accessible on the web, or not. And they can turn web access on/off as needed/desired. In my case a Raspberry Pi configured the same as my web based server works amazingly well and it's easy to set up a more powerful hardware option if needed.

The truth is, in my case, most companies don't need a "bigger" server than a Raspberry Pi because the apps run entirely on the client side and don't transfer huge amounts of data, and the database server (CouchDB) is very efficient.

Can you elaborate little bit more ?