One alternative that I haven't looked into much at all, so take this with a grain of salt - is to have anything identifying on a local network, firewalled, and accessible via a site-to-site VPN connection to an Azure hosted server. Like I said, I haven't looked at what an implementation would take, but if you could create a firewalled, safe, tunnel to your data hosted on prem, and other data in the cloud - then it's an option?
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-create-site-to-site-cross-premises-connectivity/ On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 2:28 PM, Greg Keogh <g...@mira.net> wrote: > Folks, I have a demo SQL database in Azure and it's working nicely, but > now we have to consider how to get it into production use. My demo DB > doesn't contain any real names and addresses, but the live DB will have > information about hospital patients, and you can imagine how confidential > that is! I'm told they will demand the DB be stored on hospital managed > servers, which is a damn nuisance in reality as I'm sure many of you know > how tedious it can be trying to break through walls of bureaucracy around > IT departments in places like hospitals and the government. > > This opens up the whole issues of "trust and the cloud". Since the Snowden > revelations, I don't know how anyone with confidential data can trust cloud > storage. Even I don't trust it and all of my backups in Rackspace and Azure > blobs are pkzipc AES encrypted. So how on earth could a hospital be > convinced that cloud store is an attractive option? > > I just remembered that Amazon has a special area that is certified secure > so they can get government contracts. I haven't seen anything like that in > Azure. Despite that, it doesn't make me feel much better, as we now know > the NSA was intercepting hardware and bugging it, and coercing huge telcos > to put splitters in the backbones, and using secret FISA orders to threaten > other even huger companies to secretly hand over their records. So who the > hell can trust anyone in the cloud?! > > Is anyone dealing in this sort of cloud/trust business at the moment? > What's the state of play? is there any hope? Am I just paranoid? (who's > monitoring this email?) > > *Greg K* >
