Who is afraid of the cloud?

At 50 billion euros, Federal Minister of the Interior Friedrich estimates the economic damage that would be Germany is generated every year by industrial espionage and crime - irrespective of Prism and the like.

The risk of industrial espionage is underestimated especially by small and medium-sized companies, although they are also the target of foreign espionage.

They must be educated about the dangers, made aware of the issues of IT security and Privacy be sensitized and supported with concrete assistance, especially in dealing with operational know-how.

The carelessness of SMEs must come to an end: Now that we know that data is subject to large-scale and warrantless surveillance, people should stop putting their blueprints for the next generation of devices in Dropbox, for example, or sharing them via their Gmail accounts.

Holistic ERP-Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are, so to speak, inherently exposed to increased risk because they map almost all of a company's business processes - from production and human resources to research and development, controlling and marketing.

If sensitive data is tapped here, the economic damage is programmed.

In addition to concerns about Privacy and security, but a frequent lack of flexibility also prevents standardized ERP-solutions are selling like hot cakes on the Cloud-find a market.

According to the Experton Group, spending on SaaS enterprise resource planning solutions is expected to rise from €35.1 million in 2013 to €282.6 million by 2017.

However, the experts originally forecast sales of as much as EUR 467 million in 2016.

The confident forecast had to be revised downward.

New ERP solutions

However, in the meantime Cloud-based ERPsolutions, which are specifically tailored to the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises and are hosted here in Germany.

Here, possibilities for individual customization are given and users can trust in the German data protection guidelines if the data centers and provider companies in Germany are located.

So what do we learn from Prism and Co.

Certainly not that we should renounce progress and technologies, development and increased efficiency, but that we should inform ourselves, be educated and protect ourselves from a drain of knowledge.

Above all, we should make ourselves aware: There are also many innovative solutions in Germany and Europe!

From a dependence on US-technologies, we can go a long way toward detaching ourselves.

Rethinking the user

This is a pleasing observation that we are also making with German e-mail providers, which are experiencing a large influx as a result of the debate surrounding the spying scandal.

Der Spiegel" reported that new registrations for Freenet's e-mail service had increased by 80 percent.

So a change in thinking is taking place. There are also a number of exciting companies and start-ups in Germany, which offer innovative encryption solutions.

And also German Cloud-solutions can now emerge from the shadow of the overpowering US-technologies.