Get Your Head In The Cloud

 

Cloud-based solutions are no longer the wave of the future they are a necessary driver for most Enterprise businesses. The “cloud” which is really just a very large, remotely-connected server to store and access data isn’t a new phenomenon, but there are still the same old concerns about how secure data really is out there in Cyber Space.

The truth is you can control the safety of your data. Your overall cloud strategy and your use of the technology play a large part in the security process. It can range from choosing what you put on the cloud; to different models of service delivery like IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS; to what cloud-based server you use.

There are some very big, well-known companies with pretty good track records, like Rackspace, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google that have teams of people working around the clock on security and monitoring and can immediately identify, assess and remedy potential risks or threats. That’s something that most locally housed IT infrastructures can’t match. By storing data in the cloud businesses free up local IT infrastructure and are able to cut costs, but with any investment you must weigh the risk versus the reward.

So what are some of the things you need to consider before putting certain information in the cloud?

Data Breach: One of the major concerns when using the cloud is a data breach. The cloud presents greater challenges since you’re dealing with hypervisors and other external shared networked infrastructure. Data breaches can release personal information such as a person’s social security number or access to their credit or debit cards. Over the past couple of years, companies such as Target, Experian and Anthem BlueCross Blue Shield have been hit with major data breaches exposing personal information of millions of customers.

Data Loss and Recovery: While the data breach is considered a malicious of intrusive action, a data loss maybe a result of sever or storage malfunction. If your provider goes off-line and your data is lost, can it be recovered? Data sent to the cloud is encrypted as one of the many steps to ensure privacy. The downside is that encrypted data is harder to recover, especially if the encryption key is lost too.

Data Access: What information are you putting out there and who is going to have access to it? Sensitive, classified, or confidential information may not warrant storage on the cloud. You want to be able to monitor who has access to your data and their activities. Are these people authorized to access the data, and if not they need to be shut out of the network. You may also want to limit access to certain levels of individuals to mitigate any potential misuse of your data.

Data Availability: Storing data externally means you don’t have complete control of it anymore. Your cloud storage could go offline and someone else is now responsible for getting it back up. You want to make sure that whatever provider you chose has a proven record of highly available data and a quick turnaround for getting the system back on-line should it go down. All this needs to be spelled out in a Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Cloud-based solutions offer benefits for companies large and small, local and worldwide. What works best for a large company may not for a smaller one, but there are many options available that can make storing, sharing and accessing data more efficient and cost-effective no matter what business you are in.