On-line storage. How secure?

[Opus]

My recent thread, 'The Frustrations of iPad' focused on the ability to sync MS Outlook Calendar, Contacts and Tasks directly with PC (and vice-versa, obviously) without having personal sensitive (as in financial) information sitting in (or migrating through) a remote on-line facility. Having found a program which will do this (DejaOffice) I am nevertheless disappointed at the inability to use Pocket Informant with the DejaOffice imported MS Outlook items. However, once again, with PI here is a program which does sync via on-line facility (google calendar) and others use iCloud and such programs, so my curiousity is raised because this is obviously a type of facility which is greatly used. However, just how secure are these types of facility to ever more sophisticated hacking? Sony (I think it was) got taken out big time not long ago because their system was successfully hacked, and quite a few million personal details etc. were compromised, if I remember correctly. If it wasn't actually Sony it was another big international corporate set-up. So at the moment I am left with a sufficient seed of doubt about the real security of this type of operation. Convenient it might be. But is it really sound?

 

[seneca18]

It was indeed Sony. It shut down the PlayStation network for over a week. While there is always a risk of cloud based data being hacked I would not worry about it too much. Thousands if not millions of people have taken to this type of operation for data storage. That being said, personally I do not store any information such as my bank accounts or credit card numbers via this method. I do not even like having a password keeper that syncs between devices. I use one that is device specific and just saves the information directly to the device. I think a lot of it depends on the data or document you are wanting to save. For me, if a hacker wants to look and read papers I wrote in college I say enjoy . Seriously though, it is secure.

 

[Opus]

Many thanks, seneca18, for your general tones of re-assurance. I note your points. Much apreciated.