As you know, Google has made waves with its recent loss of 40,000 email accounts. Though they’ve now been fully restored, the incident has left a huge question mark over the cloud as people ask, “Is my data safe?” This question is all the more pertinent to the countless businesses leveraging the cloud for mission critical data.

Over the past 10 years, we’ve worked with thousands of companies, helping them use the cloud to accomplish their strategic goals. While security concerns are certainly nothing to be overlooked, there are a few factors that decision-makers should keep in mind when evaluating on-premise vs. cloud-based delivery models.

Under the client server model, all data is typically stored in one location. If someone manages to break in, they have access to all of your data. In this way, security is only as good as the physical security of your organization.

Also, the rigidness of rules and difficulty of accessing information outside of the confines of one’s office makes it awfully tempting to bend the rules. Consider, for example, the breach experienced by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs a few years back, where an employee downloaded information to his laptop – a breach of policy for non-nefarious purposes. When that laptop went missing, security was compromised. Cloud-based data management, on the other hand, eliminates this temptation by making such information available anywhere. It doesn’t need to be stored on a device, and advanced login technology can ensure that the information is only seen by authorized persons.

This isn’t to invalidate the anxiety felt by the 40,000 Gmail users who thought they’d lost their email accounts. However, we’ve got to keep this in perspective. Google restored these accounts in a very short period of time, thanks to its extensive redundancies, which includes secret facilities on multiple continents.

So you’ve got to ask yourself this question: all things considered, is my information really going to be safer on my own server than Google’s?