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What You Need to Know About Cloud Security

Cloud Services are not a just a whimsical trending fad that will soon go away. It is a real solution that has many facets enabling businesses everywhere to lower costs, backup their data, and increase efficiency. But with this wonderfully enabling technology comes its need for special attention to security.

A FEW STAGGERING STATISTICS ABOUT CLOUD COMPUTING

  • By 2015, end-user spending on cloud services is estimated to be more than $180 billion
  • It is predicted that the global market for cloud equipment will reach over $80 billion by 2020
  • 82% of companies reportedly saved money by moving to the cloud

Provider Responsibilities

  • Infrastructure is secure

  • Client’ data and applications are protected

  • Compliance with federal regulations

User Responsibilities

  • Take measures to protect their application

  • Use strong passwords

  • Strong authentication measures to secure their cloud provided assets.

HOW DO YOU ENSURE YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE WORKING IN A SECURE CLOUD SERVICE?

Having an established security plan with an audit trail is a must have for customer using Cloud services. Cloud customers must ensure that their cloud providers adequately have security measures.

Cloud providers must provide a layered approach to security.  There must firewall type control to keep people out.  Preventative controls like strong password requirements and credential changes.  Detection control where access and behavior must be monitored for anomalies.  Corrective control where restoring systems to full function from backup methods is fast and responsive. Cloud computing is one of the fasted growing segments of the IT industry and as a national master agent, Telarus has access to provide many of these cloud services to its partners.

As with other major business decisions, an enterprise must evaluate the benefits and be prepared to address any risks and challenges cloud adoption brings. Moving applications to the cloud and accessing the benefits means first evaluating specific data security issues and cloud security issues. As more information on individuals and companies is placed in the cloud, companies must address cloud computing security issues.

COMMON CLOUD SECURITY THREATS

  • Data Breaches
  • Data Loss
  • Service Traffic Hijacking
  • Insecure APIs
  • Denial of Service
  • Malicious Insiders
  • Abuse of Cloud Services
  • Insufficient Due Diligence
  • Shared Technology

SOLUTIONS FOR CLOUD SECURITY CONCERNS

Cloud computing security issues include preserving confidentiality and privacy of data. The primary solutions for these problems include encryption or tokenization of data stored in the cloud. New solutions have emerged for improving cloud security and protecting sensitive data and important applications. One solution is the cloud encryption gateway, which helps enterprises address cloud security issues. The gateway can serve as a proxy “entry” to a cloud application, replacing sensitive data with encrypted or tokenized values for transmission and storage in the cloud.