One of the greatest challenges facing business and government organizations is how to store and move sensitive data around the world while maintaining security. Storing and securing critical data held within data centers (whether physical or virtual) is top of mind from the boardroom to the remote data center. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Cloud IT Infrastructure Tracker, spending on private cloud IT infrastructure in 2015 will grow by 15.8 percent year over year to $12.1 billion, while spending on public cloud IT infrastructure will increase by 29.6 percent to $20.5 billion.

Companies today are utilizing shared hosting facilities but, in doing so, they run the risk of exposing critical data to surreptitious elements, not to mention the challenges associated with jurisdictional hazards. Organizations of all sizes are subject to leaky Internet and leased lines. As the world shifts away from legacy systems to more agile software solutions, it is becoming clear that the time is now for a paradigm shift in how to store, access and archive sensitive data.

The Paradigm Shift
To meet customer and market demands, cloud providers and system integrators, government entities and enterprises require an alternative secure storage and transport solution. What if there was a way to bypass the Internet and leased lines entirely to mitigate exposure and secure sensitive data from hijacking, theft and espionage, while reducing costs both from an infrastructure and risk perspective?

Let's explore some of the reasons for this paradigm shift:

• Network Hazards - Today's cloud environments run across hybrid public and private networks using IT controls that are not protective enough to stay ahead of real-time cyber security threats. Enterprise data is maliciously targeted, searchable or stolen. Sensitive data can be subjected to government agency monitoring and exposed to acts of industrial espionage through unauthorized access to enterprise computers, passwords and cloud storage on public and private networks.
• Jurisdictional Risks - A government jurisdiction could restrict or force the exposure of enterprise information, especially when it has regularly been replicated or backed up to an undesirable jurisdiction at a cloud service provider's data center. Diplomatic privacy rules are under review by governments' intent on restricting cross-jurisdictional access and transfer of the personal and corporate data belonging to their citizens. This has created the requirement for enterprises to operate separate data centers in each jurisdiction - financially prohibitive for many medium-sized enterprises.

A New Way of Thinking About Data Storage and Protection
The development of a neutral, space-based cloud storage network could provide government and private organizations with an independent cloud infrastructure platform, entirely isolating and protecting sensitive data from the outside world. Enterprise data can be stored and distributed to a private data vault designed to enable secure cloud storage networking without any exposure to the Internet and/or leased lines. Resistant to natural disasters and force majeure events, its architecture would provide a truly revolutionary way of reliably and redundantly storing data, liberating organizations from risk of cyberattack, hijacking, theft, espionage, sabotage and jurisdictional exposures.

Costs for such a solution would run the same or less to build, operate and maintain as terrestrial networks and would serve as a key market differentiator for cloud service providers that are looking for solutions that provide physical protection of their customers' critical information. This is because such a system would need to include its own telecom backbone infrastructure to be entirely secure. While this is extremely expensive to accomplish on the ground, it need not be the case if properly architected as a space-based storage platform.

In the near future, multinational enterprises, governments, militaries and embassies will turn to satellites for the centralized storage and distribution of sensitive or classified material, the distribution of video and audio gathered by drones or the storage and protection of video and audio feeds from authorized personnel in remote locations.

The Time Is Now
As data breaches continue to soar, organizations that rely on today's Internet and cloud storage technology are demanding solutions that replace traditional infrastructure with solutions that isolate and protect critical, sensitive data. Now is the time to make this new paradigm in cloud storage a reality.