The head of information policy and security at the UK Highways Agency has urged caution when it comes to the adoption of hosted or cloud applications such as Google Apps and Windows Live, which he believes should not be used for critical tasks at present.
Speaking at the European Computer Audit, Control and Security (EuroCac) conference in Budapest this week, Ray Butler, a former information systems auditor at HM Customs for more than 25 years, told an audience of audit and IT specialists that hosted applications were still an unknown quantity in terms of security.
Asked by eWEEK Europe UK whether he believed web office applications such as Google Docs were inherently more insecure than local applications, Butler said that it depended on the circumstances but he wouldn’t advise using such tools for confidential or critical information.
“It depends doesn’t it. I work collaboratively, not in Google Docs but in Huddle and Microsoft Office Live,” he said. “But I wouldn’t use it for anything that would screw me up or my organisation up if it got lost or improperly released or anything simply because I don’t know how good the security is.”
For more go to: eWEEK Europe UK
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