
Burnt Orange Solutions Share How To Secure Your Data In The Cloud
Our Saskatoon IT Tips are from the Trusted professionals at Burnt Orange Solutions. We promise to have a one-hour response time for all your Saskatoon IT support needs. Honesty and respect are important to us. In our latest IT Expert tip Article, we share a recent Forbes article for businesses in Saskatoon on how to secure your data in the cloud.
How To Secure Your Data In The Cloud.
The cloud revolution is definitely here. Ever more businesses are moving critical IT infrastructure and data to the cloud. This move is driven by the tremendous potential of cloud platforms that promise unprecedented operational efficiency, productivity, agility, flexibility and profitability. But every technology has its benefits and drawbacks. In this case, the flip side lies with lack of ownership and control and, therefore, security.
Is The Cloud Secure?
The very nature of the cloud makes it susceptible to cyber crimes such as data hacks. The ongoing raging debate on whether Russian hackers had something to do with swaying the 2016 American election illustrates this, and also underscores the importance of cloud security and the need for maintaining data integrity.
A recent survey from Forbes suggests that the cloud will drive 83% of enterprise workloads by 2020. Also, in their bid to achieve digital transformation and customer delight, half of global enterprises will be using at least one cloud platform. There is a huge amount of sensitive data already sitting in the cloud and the amount of high-value data will only grow exponentially as time passes. We are already seeing cases of data being compromised in the cloud – this includes marketing data, health records, election data and more.
The Cloud Security Challenge
With more data moving to the cloud, maintaining the sanctity and integrity of this data becomes of paramount importance. The cloud is a lucrative target because of what lies within, such as intellectual property, mission-critical trade secrets and personal information. This is the currency of today’s sophisticated hackers.
Responding to growing hyperjacking incidents and cloud data theft attempts, Google recently announced “shielded VMs” to protect cloud servers from rootkits. Other cloud service providers (CSPs) have also launched new cloud security technologies to prevent hostile attacks. However, as the user of these cloud platforms, you have to understand accountability at your end, making sure you don’t leave everything to the CSP.
Securing Your Data In The Cloud
Before rushing to the cloud for its power, it is necessary to take a few steps to strengthen security and plug potential vulnerabilities or leaks. This is proving to be a challenge because there is a certain lack of preparedness from the security perspective when businesses move some or all of their processes to the cloud.
In many cases, the IT team has a sudden realization that they no longer have control over their data and scramble to implement remedial measures. This fundamentally underlines
lack of a focused security approach when it comes to securing an organization’s assets in the cloud. An organization planning to leverage cloud-based IT and processing resources must extensively analyze and evaluate the risks associated with using disruptive technologies like cloud computing.
Inability to protect data in the cloud is also a direct outcome of needlessly complicating the thought process behind cloud security. If you are an organization planning a move to the cloud, first think how you have secured the data on on-premise servers and the various checks and balances you have put in place to protect data and control and manage its access. Now think about how you can replicate the same steps to secure data in the cloud.
The core focus of cloud security is keeping your data secure. Understand that the onus of cloud security not only rests on you but also on the cloud service provider – cloud security is essentially a combined effort between you and the CSP. So, the first question to ask is, how ready is your CSP for securing your business applications and data?
Important components of cloud security
Here are the important components of cloud security that you must keep in mind to ensure better data security:
• Make sure you sign up with a service provider that has stringent security policies in place. Also, know if this will make your auditors happy.
• Use security tools to identify the gaps between the cloud provider’s security measures to know which security issues you must address at your end. It pays to remember that if the underpinning host hardware (VMs) and OS are exploited, then every application/data asset hosted therein can be compromised. Over the past few years, we’ve seen several CSPs get hacked. The list includes Amazon Web
Services, Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple iCloud, Microsoft Azure and the like.
• Two leading public cloud heavyweights Microsoft and Amazon have already launched their own credential management tools that ensure legitimate access to sensitive data while keeping intruders out. Learn more about such sophisticated security tools to protect your data in the cloud.
More on components of cloud security
• Comprehensive encryption at the file level forms the backbone of all your cloud security efforts. Even if your cloud provider encrypts data, don’t depend on the provider. Deploy sophisticated and all-encompassing encryption solutions to encrypt data before uploading it to the cloud.
• It’s also imperative that you secure the end-user devices that are accessing cloud-based resources with advanced endpoint security. Deploy firewall solutions to protect your network perimeter, especially if you are subscribing to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model.
We hope this article gave you some insight. If you want to ensure your business’s IT security, contact the Trusted Saskatoon IT professionals at Burnt Orange Solutions and we can take IT worries off your plate.
Burnt Orange IT Solutions Products & Services:
- Managed Networks
- Backup and Recovery
- Data and Network Security
- Hosted Services
- Telephone Systems
- Secure WiFi Networks
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