Cloud security is also known as cloud computing security. It is a liability of the cloud providers to protect the customer’s cloud data, information, computing environment, and application against cyber attacks and cyber threats. It includes the technology, policies, controls, and security services over cloud computing to protect data against hackers, malware, and unauthorized access of the data.

Before we learn more about cloud security, let’s learn some basic things about cloud computing.

Why we need Cloud security?

These days, every business is migrating digitally. Every business owns the application or website to handle it online. It is hard to store and access the data of millions of customers on the local computer. So, they must need to store the data on the cloud.

Here, the main concern is that cloud service providers store many organizations’ or applications’ data at a single data center. If cloud providers don’t care about the security, data of a single application can be stolen by unauthorized access / SQL injection, or cyber-attacks.

Every organization should concern about security rather it is small or large. In early 2020, Might have you heard the news about the data leak of Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin? These all are large organizations and they have their private cloud services even though their data has been leaked.

Most organizations are using public cloud services. So, public cloud service users should be more concerned about your application data. In real life, you can see that how many websites are hacked on the daily basis.

Cloud security is more expensive for customers, but it’s far better than having your business hacked.

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Cloud security challanges

Unauthorized acess

Every organization allows their customer to access their data via the public internet as online business attracts customers from the overall world. It becomes easy for the hacker to steal the data via the public internet. If you don’t configure the proper security for the cloud data, hackers can spoil your data center and you will lose every private information.

Insecure APIs

API stands for Application interface programing. You can get any required data via API from the service providers rather than generating it yourself. Most developers use it because it makes building and developing applications simple.

The security challenge comes to API users when they find any vulnerability in the API. The hacker has the strength to crush your whole application via adding a single line of vulnerable code to the API. So, if you are using insecure API, stay tuned about the security of API.

Let me share my personal experience with this thing. I’ve built a WordPress website during my college days and added some plug-ins to customize the website easily. One morning, my entire website crashed because of a plugin crash.

So, users should use only secure API to protect application data.

Breaking the account

Customers can log in to their accounts using their credentials in all applications that include secure information. Many customers set very weak passwords for their accounts. So, hackers can easily hijack their accounts via brute force attacks or using security cracking tools.

Once hackers put their hands on any customer’s account, they can steal their whole private information and change the account password. So, the application developer makes sure that set some criteria to set the account password for every customer.

Control over cloud data

When we use any third-party cloud service, we have limited access to data over the cloud according to the service we have bought. For example, In SaaS (Software as a service), you will get only the application frontend. In PaaS, you can manage the application host services. If you use IaaS, you will be able to manage the data of the applications without restrictions.

Malicious Insider

There is a lot of malicious insiders who have authorization of the organization’s cloud data, sensitive resources, and cloud network. As organizations don’t have full access to cloud data in the PaaS and IaaS services, it is hard for them to detect malicious insiders in their network.

Also, data accessible via the public internet makes it easy for a hacker to achieve their goal. So, make sure that your application doesn’t lead to any misconfiguration, and doesn’t allow an attacker to move inside the application database.

DOS attacks

DOS attack is the short form for denial of service attacks. A single cloud service providers have many customers who use their services to store customer data and host their application.

Any successful DOS attack towards a single infrastructure can impact many applications’ data. After that, hackers can demand some resources or money. So, configure the proper security for any infrastructure to keep it far from malicious activity such as DOS attack, or SQL injection.

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How to secure the cloud?

There are some basic things that we should follow for cloud security purposes.

Control over access of the colud data

We need to define access control over the cloud data to improve cloud security. To fulfill this condition, make sure that only authorized users access their data. If unauthorized users try to access the data of other users, immediately block them. If you found that some users are doing a malicious activity from the device, you must block all the requests from that device.

When users upload the data to the cloud, scan and check that data is not malicious. Sometimes, hackers hide the virus and malware inside the data and upload it to your cloud to crash it.

Data Encryption

Data encryption is the best way to increase the security of any kind of data. Either you can encrypt all the data of the user or private data of the user if the encryption cost is high.

End-to-end encryption allows you to encrypt all the uploaded data in the cloud. Also, you can do communication encryption or particularly sensitive data encryption.

Take regular backup

Cloud disaster can occur at any time, and you will lose every important piece of data if you don’t have a backup of the data. So, for disaster recovery, you must have a data backup.

Users can take backup of the data either on their local computer, external devices such as pen drive, hard drive, or they can upload it to another cloud provider.

Other tips

• Users shoud use the VPN (virtual private network) before they acces the data over public wi-fi.
• Always use the strong password.
• Make sure that your system is protected with the anti-virus.

Benefits to use the cloud security

There are several benefits to using cloud computing and cloud security. Let’s look at it one by one.

Data security

To protect their customers’ data, all cloud service providers use the highest level of security. Cloud providers regularly monitor their data centers for malicious activity and malware. Additionally, they have upgraded tools for managing your data, which makes it more secure.

Furthermore, they take the backup of all data that allows you to recover your data in case of any disaster occurs.

24 x 7 avialbility

When you use cloud services, you can access the data from the cloud at any time from any place. Also, you choose your nearest data center to store the data in the cloud and access it quickly from the cloud.

If you are having trouble accessing the data from the cloud, you can get assistance from the cloud service providers. With cloud computing, your business is more powerful and secure, and there is virtually no downtime.

Pay as you use

The main benefit to use cloud security services is that customers need to pay according to their use. However, Some cloud service providers servers the SaaS services based on the subscription.

Also read:- What are the benefits of the cloud for business?

Summing up thoughts

Some organizations prefer to store the data in the local hardware still cloud provides the high security of the data. When they store data locally, they can’t access it anywhere. Also, they must need to pay high costs to manage the whole hardware and security of the data.

You can use a private cloud or software-as-a-service (IaaS) to keep an eye on sensitive data if you are an organization. However, the cost of IaaS or private cloud services is higher than SaaS or PaaS.

As a customer, you have to make sure that you are following all the steps provided in the how-to secure cloud section. Try to overcome the cloud challenges, to increase even more security of the cloud data.