Explain briefly the security concerns of cloud computing.
In cloud computing world, security is a two sided coin. The security is very important particularly when moving critical applications and sensitive data to public and shared environments.
Privacy concern with a third party
The important security concern is for privacy considerations. That is, if third party is hosting all our data, we do not know if it is safe or not. Everything that is placed on cloud can be accessed by anyone. There are also other privacy concerns because government can get the data that is placed on cloud easily from organization’s servers. Though there are popular companies who provide good security to keep the data safe, it can be hacked. The best procedure is not to perform critical tasks on a cloud platform without extensive security. If it cannot be managed then it is advisable to have less critical data on cloud.
Security level of third party
Service providers are doing all they can to protect their customer’s data. As a matter of fact, the vendors will have to make sure that the subscriber has been fully satisfied from their service or else the firm will not be gaining customers.
Most of the security problems are due to loss of control, lack of trust and multi-tenancy. Multi-tenancy – it is an architecture in which single instance of a software application serves multiple customers. Each customer is called tenant. These problems exist mainly in third party management models. So there should be strong protection measures in order to prevent the hacking of data.
Security Benefits
Providers do endeavor to ensure security. Cloud provide some of the security measures ensuring the customers data are safe:
Centralised Data
There are some good security traits that come with centralizing your data, making your system more inherently secure.
Reduced Data Leakage:
If the data is centralized and the various devices used like laptop, notebook computers can access the data, no need to backup the data. There is threat for theft of the handheld devices. If the data are lost and although any security measures like encryption is applied and it may be compromised and the entire data may be in the hands of the thief. Moreover by maintaining data on the cloud, employing strong access control, limiting the employee downloading to only what they need to perform a task, computing can limit the amount of information that could be potentially be lost.
Monitoring benefits:
Central storage is easier to control and monitor. The flipside is the nightmare scenario of comprehensive data theft. If your data is maintained on a cloud, it is easier to monitor security than have to worry about the security of numerous servers and clients. The security professional figuring out smart ways to protect and monitor access to data stored in one place (with the benefit of situational advantage) than trying to figure out all the places where the company data resides. You can get the benefits of Thin Clients today but Cloud Storage provides a way to centralize the data faster and potentially cheaper. The logistical challenge today is getting Terabytes of data to the Cloud in the first place.
Instant Swap over - if a server in the Cloud gets compromised (i.e. broken into), then clone that server at the click of a mouse and make the cloned disks instantly available to the Cloud Forensics server. When the swap over is performed its seamless to the users. No need to spend time to replicate the data or fix the breach. Abstracting the hardware allows to do it instantly.
Logging
In cloud logging is improved. Logging is often an afterthought, to solve the issues insufficient disk space is allocated. Cloud Storage changes all this - no more ‘guessing’ how much storage you need for standard logs. With your logs in the Cloud you can leverage Cloud Compute to index those logs in realtime and get the benefit of instant search results. This help to Compute instances and to measure in and scale as needed based on the logging load - meaning a true real-time view. Most modern operating systems offer extended logging in the form of a C2 audit trail. This is rarely enabled for fear of performance degradation and log size. Now you can ‘opt-in’ easily - if you are willing to pay for the enhanced logging, you can do so. Granular logging makes compliance and investigations easier.
Secure builds
When you developed your own network and you have to buy third-party security software to get the level of protection you want. With the cloud solution, those tools can be bundled in and available to you and you can develop your system with whatever level of security you desire.
Easier to test impact of security changes: this is a big one. Spin up a copy of your production environment, implement a security change and test the impact at low cost, with minimal startup time. This is a big deal and removes a major barrier to ‘doing’ security in production environments.
Drive vendors to create more efficient security software:
Billable CPU cycles get noticed. More attention will be paid to inefficient processes; e.g. poorly tuned security agents. Process accounting will make a Comeback as customers target ‘expensive’ processes. Security vendors that understand how to squeeze the most performance from their software will win.
Security Testing
Reduce cost of testing security: A SaaS provider only passes on a portion of their security testing costs. It is shared among the cloud users. The end results is that because you are in a pool with others but you never see the other users but you realize the lower cost for testing. Even with Platform as a Service (PaaS) where your developers get to write code, but the cloud code –scanning tools check for security weakness.
