Why Cloud! Read for Good Humor and Good Reasoning

In business technology, cloud security is a serious issue refraining enterprises to adopt cloud technology, no matter the potential benefits it can give to your business, there will be no deal done if a doubt would arise against the protection of a company’s data.

An organization has to manage many components of their business which diverts their focus into many directions and to optimize from all the components becomes a challenge resulting compromise in the quality of your products and services. Only big organizations can afford tools and applications and the teams of specialists to check every component of the business.

Cloud providers brought you those tools, shielded servers, applications and a team of specialists as a service to give your data storage and protection. The leverage it gives is hi-tech security with no responsibility for maintenance and expensive servers, tools, and software. So, you can go back to your real job and give your 100% to deliver quality to your customers.

Some arguments regarding these cloud security concerns

The very first reason for doubts on cloud security is trusting someone else with the company’s important asset which is stored in some far away servers.

Cloud technology was introduced to provide storage to protect data for those enterprises who could not afford the heavy maintenance of servers. The sole purpose of the technology is to give storage and data protection from various risks of losing it.

The point of storing data in the remote location under the supervision of your cloud service provider is the whole plan the cloud technology provides. When you collaborate or work within a group or in a team you do need to trust your group partners, your colleagues, your employees and everyone you work with. Same faith should be shown for your cloud service provider.

The efforts cloud providers would take to protect data comparative to the organization

Different industries have different data security standards. Organizations can be selective to choose cloud services that fulfill the requirements of their data security needs and falls up to the standards accepted by their industry.

Cloud solution providers are professionals with superior security stratagems and the team of experts determined to deliver data storage with high alert security than an organization as it’s not their real job. It's cloud providers business that they earn their livelihood from. Just like you would not compromise the quality of your products and services to lead your business in the market they would too.

It leaves organizations with no control over their data and its management

It can be seen with two prospective the negative one and the positive one. Obviously, when an organization would handle their own data stored in their on-site premises they will have full control and full management. They would have an eye on every action going around their data and its server, be it being hacked, malware attacked or lost in a physical disaster. It would be much comfortable than handing it over to professionals because it would be far away from our eyesight.

A Negative perspective is having no control over your data. What controls an organization would have if their security measures lack to protect data from any kind of threat.

A Positive perspective is having dedicated service including a team of experts, tools, safeguarded servers, and strategies to protect your data from any threat with no heavy maintenance cost invested on owned protection programs.

Cloud users also have no visibility of the infrastructure that the cloud provider uses and less transparency of their cloud security system.

It would be a careless mistake to choose a cloud provider without considering your company’s requirements and examining the cloud architecture, standards and regulations they follow, data management technologies and the security system they use. Along with that, you must check for contracts, SLAs, reliability & performance, Migration support & exit plans to avoid vendor lock-in situation, business health & company’s profile, service partnership & dependencies to gain the visibility you need. Learn how your cloud provider plans to continue to innovate and grow over time to serve your business.

All these factors of your cloud provider should align with your business needs and requirements. There are providers who conduct regular internal and external penetration testing to check their defense system which can be viewed by their customers and also allow their customers to perform their own vulnerability test to give transparency of their security system.

Using a single cloud provider’s services open up the risk of Vendor Lock-in

When a business grows its needs and requirement do too. Your workload may grow bigger than the cloud storage limit or you may need more skilled tools and applications to get more accuracy in your operations there the need for the support of an additional 3rd party comes.

When you will have a clear understanding of your cloud provider services and agreement with policies suitable for your business needs, going for Multi-cloud approach or exiting the on-going cloud plan should not be a problem. Be clear about what your business needs and if a cloud provider’s services suit your business plans.

The additional risk followed by cloud services of Insecure APIs and gateways

The moment this issue has been recorded the security providers got on their toes as the loophole in the technology can cause them to be the target of cyber attack risking all their customers' data.

After studying the danger caused and API attacks breaching security, prevention operations started and API security platforms are developed to overcome the danger and keep insecure APIs in check and mitigate API risks. Now it has been added in many cloud providers’ security system checklist like other tools and applications.

User’s concern about unmanaged Encryption key

Many cloud providers facilitate information protection by encrypting their users' data “in transit” and while it is “at rest” and use various other methods such as they allow their customers to control their own encryption key if they wish, a method called sharding in which files are split into chunks and then encrypted separately to store in different places. Even if the data is stolen attacker would have chunks of random undeciphered information.

What a user can do to preserve its cloud data is using encryptions before uploading data to the cloud. It is a commendable way to secure your data against malware threats from hackers on the cloud. It decreases the chances of data being stolen without deciphering it. Even if someone obtains your data from the cloud provider’s end it would be of no advantage.

Yet there are many other risks that follow the cloud technology and need the attention of its provider and users to be dealt with caution. The risk of technology’s shared resource nature is one of the biggest challenges as the threat can be caused by the cloud users’ end affecting the cloud security system and all its other users as well. Learn how cloud data can be secured from a user’s end in our Article Risks and Resolutions: Cloud Data Security and after giving you all my arguments to convince you and ignite your faith in cloud technology I would present you insights of Cloud Security System and How It Works!