On-demand cloud computing and data storage can save companies money, but many businesses—particularly in finance and health care—are wary of handing data to third parties, fearing hacking, accidental data loss, or theft by rogue employees of cloud providers.

New security solutions are appearing: One verifies cloud providers' claims that your data is safely lodged on its own server. Another protects your cloud-based data by using a math function to divide it into 16 segments, any 10 of which can be used to re-create the entire original set.