Cloud storage and sharing services are increasingly popular these days. It offers unlimited storage space for users to store different things like content and confidential information like passwords, PINs, debit/credit card details and so on. These online services use remote servers to store data. From a user’s perspective, you rely on third parties to take care of all your important data and private information. But are these services really safe?
Let’s elaborate on the top 5 cloud security issues faced by consumers today.
Internal clouds are not inherently secure
According to an industrial survey, many enterprises in the last one year have stopped using third party cloud services. Instead, they have started creating their personal cloud service behind firewalls. If you are not comfortable in leaving your data in the hands of third parties, you may consider this to be an option.
Even if someone builds private clouds, it is not entirely secure. If you are looking at this as an option, you are advised to build a protected cloud to store all your information. Patch management should be implemented strategically and detection methods (cloud based or locally) should be strong.
Security visibility and risk awareness to be taken care of
The lack of visibility in protection, that is typically offered by third party cloud services invite a huge number of security vulnerabilities. This could be taken as a severe security issue. If you are venturing into building a private cloud, you need to take care of the lack of visibility and apply the best possible solution.
Another set of issues that this issue brings up is that if a cyber rogue attempts a security breach into the cloud, there should be ways for the organization to know about it. The best solution according to experts for a person to gauge this information is by using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
Safety of confidential information
As of now, there is no method that can be branded as foolproof for storing information safely on the clouds. Encrypting data is a solution but you need to know where and how to encrypt data. As per experts, the fundamental step of encryption is not keeping the encryption key and the encrypted data together.
At present, very few organizations offer the provision to use virtual machines which is a step up solution and helps in integrating the guest environment. If this happens, a malware intruding the cloud can track the encryption-decryption method and get a hold on the content as well as the encryption key.
Application Security
With the use of applications on the rise, there has been an ever increasing concern for security. When an application resides in the cloud, the importance of security increases manifolds. Enterprises often make the mistake of putting up applications on remote servers without any level of security in the beginning.
App security is still in a nascent stage and requires sufficient development. User inputs require to be taken care of and outputs should always be sent to the user after being encoded. In the present scenario, this is a method that will help sort out majority of the app security issues in the cloud.
Improvement in authentication and authorization
Cloud authentication and authorization is arguably the easiest thing to be solved among all the other issues. However, this does not imply an easy solution at hand as enterprises have different ways to manage and apply security solutions. The current authentication system has to be determined and analyzed with regards to its competence. Upon getting a positive result, a second analysis has to be conducted to determine whether it is the most preferred solution.
As cloud usage is on the rise, so is the threats associated with it. The five different cloud security issues mentioned above are the ones that are confronting business organizations the most. There are experts’ solutions available which you can use to ensure better security.
Brooke M. Perry is an ardent technician associated with Qresolve online technical support, with wide experience of fixing issues with PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones. With a strong track record of devising effective ways of remote Pc repair and system security, she has so far helped thousands of users across the globe. Her writings on tech issues are the reflection of her in-depth interest and command she carries as a online computer support technician. Her blogs and articles have been rated high for their lucid style and easy to understand language.