Major Cloud Computing Security Challenges
As business owners in this 21st century, we want a situation whereby the business data can be accessed on our devices in the office and at home.
We want the data to be easily accessible for different departments of our company to smoothen our operations, this is now made possible with cloud computing technology.
However, there are still challenges businesses are facing with cloud computing, especially when it comes to making the business environment secure for sensitive data.
To benefit from cloud computing technology, you need to understand the different security challenges in it to be able to make the right steps in finding a solution to it.
The next step is selecting the best tools and vendors to reduce or avoid such challenges.
In today’s technology-driven world, security in the cloud is a very serious issue which you should discuss with your management from time to time, this is not with the top officials alone but down to the casual workers.
Different cloud technology challenges
- DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service)
Now that most business owners are aware of the merits of moving their data to the cloud, the cloud service providers are now becoming the main target for hackers who carry out various malicious attacks.
A successful hack to the data system of the service provider would enable them to have access to the vital information of the businesses using the cloud service.
DDoS attacks, although not rare before now, but not much popular before the transition to cloud storage by big companies.
VeriSign has reported that IT services and SaaS are still the major target industries for hackers.
Some of the powerful DDoS attacks experienced by companies are well carried out to disrupt the web servers and make the system not respond to genuine user requests.
If the DDoS attack is completely successful, it would make the website somewhat inactive for a few hours or even for some days.
This will result in a loss of profit as customers would not be able to do business with you during this period.
It will also make you lose brand authority and customer trust.
This is the reason it’s very important to patronize cloud services with the best DDoS protection as a business owner.
And if you’re a cloud services provider, you should offer the state of the art security for all clients and educate them on the features of the different scales of services you render.
- Data breaches
Data breaches in the US dipped in the year 2018 with a record of 1,244 compared to the year 2017 record of 1,632.
The business and Healthcare sectors were known to have recorded the most breaches in 2018, and hacking was seen to have been the major cause of these breaches.
This is more reason it’s important to secure sensitive data for your businesses and it’s the main challenge of cloud computing.
- Data loss
During the transition to cloud security, when businesses move their data to the cloud, it’s likely that some information gets lost, especially if the migration is not handled by professionals.
This loss of data may also occur as a result of malicious tampering, accidental deletion, or come from the cloud service provider.
To overcome this issue, it is important to set out measures to recover your data should there be data loss during the process.
Ensure the cloud service vendor has data recovery mechanisms in the cloud service platform along with an integrated system to lessen the malicious attacks.
- Insecure Access Points
One of the major benefits of storing your business data in the cloud is because cloud technology makes it easy to access your data from any device and from anywhere.
With this wide range of accessibility, it becomes an avenue for hackers to also have their wayfinding loopholes in your system and exploit that to their advantage.
As the vendor, you should have the web application firewall installed to examine all the related HTTP requests to the website and ensure fake (bot) traffic is always blocked
It helps to protect the different web applications from various security breaches.
There are also some other challenges in this cloud platform including notifications & alerts.
Once the threat is identified in the cloud platform, altering that particular application or website manager should be a part of the best security plan.
In this way, all the important business data will be secured with minor or no threats.
