One of the biggest barriers to managed services adoption according to the Claranet Research Programme is data security, with seventy-one per cent of respondents saying it was an important concern to consider before migrating to a cloud provider.
For businesses reliant on e-commerce, the safeguarding of customer financial data is crucial in retaining customer trust. Without it nobody will buy from you, and it doesn’t matter who it is in the e-commerce transactional chain who messes up; if a customer bought from your site, any problems will be blamed on you.
Consequently the thinking amongst many IT managers seems to be that the closer data and process is to their chests, the safer it is, so they try to keep as much in-house as possible.
However, this logic isn’t necessarily sound. While everyone in a the e-commerce transaction chain (below) must be PCI DSS compliant in their own right, the burden of actually making sure all the key tenets of PCI DSS compliancy are enforced all the time, along with the management of internal infrastructure produces more pressure on in-house IT departments, ultimately leading to data security issues.