The following three posts explore the topic of cloud hosting and the challenges it faces in providing secure data environments for business consumers. Additionally, it discusses measures taken to combat these challenges, whether they are physical risks to hosting platforms or cybercrime.
The need for secure data
It can be said that the concept of security in all aspects of computing is divided into two areas, data preservation and data control. The first of these concerns is the ability to ensure that data is not lost or corrupted, whether it is sensitive (ie private) or not. Data preservation can be essential for the effective operations of a business, for example, to be able to contact suppliers/customers or to monitor and analyze business performance (business intelligence). In many cases, regulators require companies to retain data for periods of time to provide audit trails about their activities, and where data is considered personal, confidential, or proprietary in relation to customers, vendors, or employees, companies also They will be bound by data protection laws to keep that data.
The second issue concerns the risk of sensitive data being viewed by those who should not have access to it. Again, data protection laws govern companies when it comes to obtaining personal data only with an individual’s permission and then ensuring that they control who has access, restricting unwarranted access. In addition, however, companies will invariably want to keep their own business operations private as well to prevent competitors from gaining an advantage over them.
All IT infrastructure must deal with these security issues, whether it’s personal or business-grade computing, and this has been a particular challenge for cloud computing in general, including cloud-based hosting.
vulnerabilities
Ultimately, cloud computing services require networks of physical servers to create the pool of computing resources from which clients can access their computing as a service, which means that all cloud resources always have some kind of of physical location. Furthermore, cloud services rely on a point where they can be accessed by end users, often publicly available on the Internet and of course on a public network such as the Internet to transfer the data used by the service. Each of these three elements of a typical public cloud service has its own vulnerabilities in terms of data protection and preservation.
Physical security
In terms of the physical infrastructure used to build a cloud service, many of the security challenges are the same as any other hosting platform. To keep data safe, providers must first keep infrastructure safe and running, and data centers where cloud servers are housed go to great lengths to this end. In terms of access, they ensure that the facilities themselves are protected from unauthorized personnel through the use of tools such as biometrics, security cameras, guards, and limited access to individual server farms. This not only controls the risk of intentional sabotage or physical hacking, but also the risk of accidental damage caused by an engineer affecting another organization’s servers, for example.
In addition, servers and network infrastructures are protected from physical damage through advanced fire protection systems and environmental controls, such as temperature management. Temperature control within data centers is one of the top expenses for a data center provider due to the large amount of heat generated by operating servers. The goal of the exercise is to ensure that the servers can run at their optimal temperatures, but if left unchecked, the damage caused could take the servers offline entirely. Data centers employ techniques such as unit chillers, ventilation, and water cooling to keep temperatures regulated and servers running smoothly.
Cloud servers and their networks also benefit from data center providers’ general expertise in keeping hardware maintained and up-to-date, ensuring that the chances of further hardware failure are reduced. As with alternative hosting solutions that locate servers in data centers, such as colocation, dedicated hosting, and VPS (Virtual Private Servers), this experience can be accessed at a fraction of the cost it would cost to companies implement internally.
However, these physical security measures are only the first step. The second part of this post explores the efforts made to keep cloud hosting software running smoothly and prevent data from falling into the wrong hands.