With so many companies considering moving part of all of their business processes to cloud computing, one of the most glaring challenges is how to protect that information. Any proprietary of sensitive information passing by the company’s firewall could be at risk. The good news is that launching a cloud computing strategy does not mean the company’s information has to become vulnerable, as long as they know how to protect it.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to protecting your information within a cloud computing strategy. One method is end-to-end encryption, while the other is tokenization. End-to-end encryption is often referred to as a comprehensive insurance policy meant to cover all aspects of your data and everything you do with it. It is secured from its origin and as it travels to its cloud computing destination.

A second method is tokenization. While this method is used by a number of companies and is considered to be a valid approach to security, tokenization has the potential to omit sensitive data that should be protected in the process of moving your information from behind your firewall to the cloud. This makes your information vulnerable to attack at key points of the process.

With full data encryption, you can be assured that even as your data requirements change over time in a cloud computing environment, you don’t have to worry that any part of your data is omitted or left vulnerable. While some will argue that encryption threatens optimal performance, this is a small price to pay to ensure cloud computing does not threaten the integrity of your data or the security you have in place.

One interesting argument in favor of tokenization is the fact that sensitive data is replaced with random tokens to mitigate the change anything can be done with the data if it were to fall into the wrong hands. The problem with this school of thought is that it suggests that data should be allowed to fall outside of the organization, especially when it is used to speed up performance. This most certainly enhances the risk for the organization and may even make cloud computing less appealing.

At the end of the day, the organization that has launched a cloud computing strategy must decide whether or not they can be comfortable with tokenization – which may or may not leak sensitive information – or end-to-end encryption, which has been known to hinder performance. It could be considered a wash, although adjustments can be made to performance expectations if it means protecting your data.