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When small organizations (100 users) move to the cloud, the effective carbon footprint reduction could be up to a 90% savings by using a shared cloud environment instead of their own local servers

For large corporations, the savings are typically 30% or more. In a case study with a large consumer-goods company, the team calculated that 32% of energy use and resulting carbon emissions could be saved by moving 50,000 e-mail users in North America and Europe to Microsoft's equivalent cloud offering.

What accounts for these significant energy savings? Think of cloud computing as being like mass transit. The data center is essentially getting computing applications to carpool or take the bus instead of sitting in their own individual servers. However, unlike mass transit, there is no sacrifice in convenience or performance with this move. Consider the disappointing fact that a typical server in a company often runs at about 10% of capacity, meaning there are lots of servers out there drawing power without doing much computing

ONE: If your enterprise isn’t in energy, defense, or finance, it’s not a high priority target so don’t spend money like it is.

TWO: If you do lead a company in one of those 3 sectors, there’s nothing on the market today that will stop an adversary from stealing your most valuable data. The best that you can hope for is to raise the cost to an adversary to mount a successful attack against you, which means he’ll target a less well-protected company instead. This is known as the You-Don’t-Have-To-Outrun-The-Bear School of Security.

THREE: Your IT department’s job is not to protect you. It’s to protect the enterprise’s network. That makes you and your C-level colleagues the “10 ring” of the target.

SLAs and the “Right to Audit” Clause When you move your data to the cloud, you must consider the risk to your brand should a breach occur. You need to ensure that any Service Level Agreements (SLAs) you have in place protect it. SLAs should address any and all risks to your data while it lives in the cloud. 

Now, in a survey of more than 600 small business owners and executives, the Ponemon Institute has tried to put a number on the cost of credit card account fraud for those vulnerable targets, comparing the damage with the cost of physical theft by employees or burglars. The result: While identity theft takes less from businesses per incident than either robberies or crooked employees, it hits them often enough that it's an equally costly or even costlier problem. According to Ponemon's study, the median account fraud incident costs a business $5,136. That's much less than the $9,913 the respondents attributed to the median cost of a burglary or $17,517, the cost they attributed to an employee theft case. But take the frequency of those incidents into account, and the pain adds up. About 86% of businesses have suffered from account fraud, more than the 77% who have been robbed or the 63% whose employees have stolen from them. And among those victims, most businesses experience employee theft either once (32%) or zero times a year (41%). Robberies are less costly but more frequent: Most businesses report them either once (29%) or between two and five times a year (38%). Account fraud is far more frequent: 45% of businesses have been digitally defrauded two to five times in the last year, and 38% have been defrauded more than five times.