'Our data is more secure in the cloud', says London Irish rugby club

'We're confident that it's safe,' says Richard Watton, operations manager at London Irish, after shift to Office 365

Storing corporate data in the cloud is "very safe" and more secure given the information is automatically backed up into online storage services.

That's the opinion of Richard Watton, operations manager at London Irish, who was talking to Computing about the rugby club's decision to move some its applications from desktop to cloud-based software, including Microsoft Office 365.

Cloud security has been high on the agenda in recent days following the theft of private photos belonging to celebrities, which were knowlingly or unknowingly backed up onto Apple's iCloud storage service.

However, Watton told Computing that, if anything, using corporate cloud storage means data is more secure than it would be if it was only stored on a user's hard drive.

"When technology moves to the extent that we can have everything cloud-based, it's probably something we'd look to do because it's very safe and very flexible," he said.

"The whole notion of backing-up is now much more easily accessible for our members of staff, which means our data is not only more secure in the cloud, but the actual data itself is more secure because it's being backed up," said Watton, adding: "I'm very happy with the system and the way it's going at the moment."

The London Irish Rugby Club operations manager explained how the similarity of Office 365 to other, conventional Microsoft Office products meant that it didn't take staff much time to get up to speed with the new cloud application.

"We haven't had a formal training session because one of the best things about the cloud in terms of the Office 365 system is that it looks the same," said Watton.

"It's not so much training; it's more telling people what's happening. I'm very impressed about how the system looks exactly the same: the average user wouldn't know the difference, which is absolutely fine," he said. "But we know in terms of management of the system that the data is safe."

Watton added that trust in Microsoft - as well as Leading Edge, the IT services company that helped with the Office 365 deployment - means that the organisation has no worries about using cloud storage.

"We're confident that it's safe, we're confident that Microsoft is looking after our data. It's ultimately a trust issue, we trust Microsoft with our data, but as importantly we trust Leading Edge to have referred us to the best option available," he said.