Cloud Security: New Dimensions for Maintaining Data Safe

Cloud computing is the most discussed subject currently and its been trending for over years now given its advantages to streamline business process and related projects. With the range of advantages cloud solutions offer, it also brings a set of vulnerabilities.

While cloud has made things a lot easier and convenient, security issues still raises concerns. Not that new security challenges are emerging, but the advanced cloud environment are facing the legacy vulnerabilities. The risk doubles when your organization shares computing resources and storage space with multiple other companies, which increases the likelihood of your systems getting compromised due to a breach in their instance. Thus to prevent these unauthorized access in the systems, organizations need to set all the security protocols in place.

Both service providers and the end-user that is the organizations need to ensure data security. As the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) suggests organizations to use multifactor authentication and encryption when their data is located off-site to safeguard their mission-critical data and information. These regulations becomes even necessary for organizations in regulated sectors such as healthcare, banking etc., which deals with sensitive details.

Cloud has introduced multiple new security dimensions that organizations must take into consideration. Let's take a closer look at what the technology have put on our plates.

Physical Security

Although virtualization has allowed data centers to add more instances without actually eating up physical space, service providers need to be more responsible when it comes to infrastructure security because organizations don't have immediate physical access to their hardware equipment. To maintain the physical integrity, cloud service providers need to ensure they secure the IT infrastructure with two-factor authentication controls, biometrics systems, video surveillance.

Multitenancy

Since there are multiple other organization residing on the same instances alongside, it increases the potential for collateral damage happening from cyberattacks. So in case other organizations happen to face a data breach, your data might be compromised as well. However, implementing rigorous security procedures can help mitigate such risk factors. On the other hand, you can go for dedicated server hosting that lets your customize your plans, provides full control and access to your hardware, and lets you keep all your data on your own server.

API vulnerabilities

APIs are the sources that bind your systems to cloud solutions and these sources are used to access your company data. You need to ensure that you provide access only to the content that you want other organizations to see and keep rest all data roped off. However, wide availability of APIs also pose as a security threat because many third-party systems rely highly on APIs and if their system is infected, chances are yours might be compromised as well. Thus, organizations need to focus on securing APIs, especially regulated industries. Private as well as public APIs must have a combination of identification, authentication and authorization features that will enables the organization to identify who is accessing what type of content and what they are authorized to do with the content accessed.

If you are able to control access to your data, you tend to reduce the possibilities of data being compromised in the cloud environment.