Posted by Eran Feigenbaum, Director of Security, Google Apps

Last week, I spoke at a panel with a few peers at RSA, a leading security conference. Microsoft CISO Bret Arsenault, Verizon risk expert Wade Baker, security guru Bruce Schneier and I joined together onstage for a session entitled (and begging the question) “Is the Cloud Really More Secure than On-Premise?” It gave us the opportunity to wholeheartedly agree that the cloud can be as safe as — or in many cases, safer than — storing data on-premise. We even contemplated hosting our data in a rival’s cloud.

It may not surprise you that we believe this — the cloud is what we do. Yet, it was great to hear the panel agree that computing should be outsourced to experts whose job is to provide the best possible security. Leading cloud providers have the size to invest more in security, the speed to react faster to threats and they can work harder to stay ahead of the bad guys.

Millions of businesses have placed their trust in the cloud over recent years, and we take this responsibility seriously. Google’s business customers now include over half of the Fortune 500 and FTSE indexes, three quarters of the DAX, and more than 30 million students, teachers and other education staff.

Looking towards the future, we’ll see even more organizations embrace the cloud — because, as many of our customers have testified, the cloud is often more useful and more secure than existing on-premise solutions. And as they do, you can expect us to evolve our protections and drive security innovations to continue to keep our customers safe.