With our life increasingly moving towards the cloud, there is a breed of professionals who are fast growing into a cult status of shorts, the ones who would steal from the cloud. Now you won’t mind when some nerds hacking into the CIA database just for the heck of it (and then proudly throwing up…), but you will surely mind when someone decides to hack away all you personalized data from, say a job site, or worse, like the recent T-Mobile data scandal when the company’s own staff didn’t mind stealing a bit of of a chunk from your personal database and selling it off (for considerable financial gains).

The cloud is vulnerable then. Agreed. What is the solution?

Beefing up the security in the cloud won’t be so easy as of now, since the cloud itself is gathering in the computing horizon. So one solution will be to refrain from putting up everything in the cloud. A mediated version will be to allow limited access to the sites through some modification with their APIs. If the websites where we store our data are granted as much access as social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook are, half the problems might be solved, as James Glick points out. Another option would be to store your data in the cloud, but have your own device to store it instead of trusting everything to the cloud. That is because hackers generally target huge databases instead of trying to crack you down individually (unless, of course, you are Tom Cruise or Paris Hilton).

However, if you do share your data in a global and huge database like Google, MSN or some such, there is quite a high possibility that your data will lure some of those nerds (ahem, for financial gains, beside the pleasure of just cracking your database). The second option will be to allow limited access to the APIs, which seems to me to be the best idea as of now in any case.

Data will keep going to the cloud. Increasingly. That’s the future. But is that future vulnerable? Will that make ourselves eligible to the mercy of legions hackers, or, in a more twisted and menacing way, the ultimate big brothers – the giant hacker who decides to rip open every user data on earth? Let’s wait and see.