It's official. The recent suspicious activity surrounding Dropbox users in Europe receiving SPAM from their email accounts associated with their Dropbox accounts was the result of a breach by hackers. Today, Barb Darrow's article confirms it was a breach, which has prompted some promises by Dropbox to add more security features like two factor authentication in the near future.
Yet again, we have an incident which points out the public failings of public cloud providers and an opportunity by service providers to distinguish themselves from these cloud platforms and educate customers on the virtues of private cloud. At the very least these types of public incidents should be prompting plenty of discussions between customers and their MSPs about what their cloud strategies should be.
True, we cannot just throw out cloud because of these public cloud outages and breaches. But, we do need to engage with customers and talk to them about cloud and whether cloud is a viable option for their organization. In my opinion, it is a well established fact that public cloud needs to be distinguished from private cloud and other managed services offerings. If MSPs don't make this distinction, they risk being painted with the same brush that is currently painting Dropbox and others.
