Data security is a key enforcement tool in the cloud era especially with the advent and rise of targeted attacks in the cloud. As with all areas of cloud security, its use should be risk-based since it is not appropriate to secure everything equally.

This is true for data security overall, regardless of whether the cloud is involved. However, many organizations aren’t as accustomed to trusting large amounts of their sensitive data—if not all of it—to a third party, or mixing all their internal data into a shared resource pool. As such, the instinct may be to set a blanket security policy for “anything in the cloud” instead of sticking with a risk-based approach, which will be far more secure and cost effective.