Cloud computing can still be a secure way to store data despite the "shocking" claims that companies have allegedly helped US intelligence agencies to access user data, a cyber security expert has claimed.
Firms, including Microsoft, have reportedly helped the US government spy on users, even providing information to the National Security Agency (NSA) under the Prism surveillance programme.
Top secret documents leaked by The Guardian showed that Microsoft helped the NSA circumvent the company’s own encryption to ensure it could intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal.
Microsoft also allegedly worked with the FBI in 2013 to give the NSA easier access through Prism to its SkyDrive cloud storage service, which has 250 million global users.
Microsoft has denied the allegations, claiming it provides no governments with direct or blanket access to its products, only providing information in response to law enforcement or national security requests.
However, Paige Leidig, from CipherCloud, believes encryption services similar to those offered by CipherCloud can ensure no-one but the customer can decode their data.
The chief marketing officer said: "The broad extent of governmental intelligence programmes that gather citizen data on cloud provider networks continues to be a shocking revelation.
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"But, after all, spying technologies pre-date the James Bond series and long before PRISM the concerns regarding backdoors has existed.
"Security innovation has caught up to this problem and enterprises have a choice to extend stronger protection to their data. For instance, my company, CipherCloud, specialises in providing military grade encryption that scrambles data into gibberish that takes hundreds of years to decrypt.
"We enable only the customer to control the keys for decoding that data so when they are sending or storing data in the cloud with a cloud service provider, no one except that customer can access the protected information."
