Cloud computing has been adopted universally as the internet, and no doubt, it is the emerging computing paradigm. Not to mention, achieving significant cost savings and agility is the primary goal of the cloud. However, there are issues related to the cloud. Cloud security is the most significant one that involves technological and societal issues that act as both drivers and constraints when considering the mass adoption of cloud computing. The technological issues related to cloud security include reliability, scalability, transparency, encryption, data rights, etc. On the other hand, societal issues involve privacy, trust, and user behavior.

While many organizations survive in the cloud environment, addressing these issues related to cloud security is a major concern here. Considering the implementation of public cloud, cloud security challenges have been one of the prime concerns from the inception of cloud to this era.

What are cloud security challenges?

Cloud computing security challenges fall into the following categories:

1. Data Loss

Data on cloud services can be lost through a natural disaster, malicious attack, or a cloud service provider’s data wipe. If the business doesn’t have a recovery plan, then losing vital information can be devastating to businesses. For example, Google lost data when its power grid was struck by lightning four times. So, the provider’s backup procedure must be scrutinized as it is related to physical access, physical storage, and natural disasters.

2. Data Protection

When you are implementing cloud, you are placing your critical data in the hands of a third party. Hence, ensuring the data remains secure is of paramount importance. So, data needs to be encrypted at all times, and it must clearly define roles regarding who will be managing the encryption keys. In most cases, the only way to ensure the confidentiality of encrypted data is to own and manage the client’s data encryption.

3. Denial of Service Attacks

This is a common form of attack where it doesn’t breach the security perimeter. Instead, it makes your website and servers unavailable to legitimate users. In some cases, it is also used as a smokescreen to do other malicious activities, including taking down security appliances such as web applications.

4. Insecure access points

One of the cloud’s primary benefits is you can access data from anywhere and from any device. But, there is a high chance that the interfaces and APIs that users interact with aren’t secure. It is easy for hackers to find these types of vulnerabilities and exploit them.

5. Compromised credentials and broken authentication

One of the main reasons for data breaches and other attacks is lack of authentication, poor key or certificate management, and weak passwords.

6. Hacked interfaces and APIs

APIs and interfaces are the most exposed part of a system, and they are usually accessible from the Internet. However, due to weak interfaces and APIs, there is an increased risk that exposes organizations to security issues related to integrity, confidentiality, accountability, and availability.

7. Exploited system vulnerabilities

Due to cloud computing’s multitenancy nature, system vulnerabilities and bugs in programs have become a bigger problem related to cloud security. As the organizations share a memory, databases, and other resources near one another, it creates new attack surfaces.

8. Account hijacking

Phishing, fraud, software exploits are prevalent in cloud security. As the attackers can spy on activities, it generates a new dimension to the threat as it can cause manipulation of transactions and modification of data.

9. Malicious insiders

The insider threat may be due to a current or former employee, a system administrator, a contractor, or a business partner. It could be from data theft to revenge. In a cloud scenario, an insider can destroy whole infrastructures or manipulate data. So, the systems that depend solely on the cloud service provider for security, such as encryption, are at the greatest risk.

10. The APT parasite 

APTs or advanced persistent threats typically move laterally through the network and blend in with normal traffic, so they’re difficult to detect.

11. Permanent data loss

The permanent data loss due to provider error has become extremely rare, but malicious hackers have been known to delete cloud data to harm businesses permanently.

Related post – Is Serverless computing the future of Cloud computing?

Why is Cloud security such a big challenge during migration and how to handle it?

Do you think cloud security is a big challenge, or managing the cloud’s privacy is the bigger problem? Since in a cloud environment, the hardware and network control is in the hands of a cloud service provider, so it is the biggest challenge. So, what is the resolution? We have already mentioned certain issues related to cloud security. Now, some major cloud security risks faced by deployers of the cloud are-

– limited control and visibility

– failure of due diligence prior while migrating from another cloud service provider

– DDoS and other malware attacks

Here is what you can do to overcome these barriers-

The most important thing to overcome limited visibility and control is choosing a good cloud hosting provider. Proper planning on the architecture with the cloud provider is of utmost considerable here. For that conducting a thorough audit of the existing infrastructure is essential to understand its finer nuances. This will help keep a check of certain factors when part of the control goes to the vendor. A timely report on the same will help to resolve the problem of ‘visibility and control.’ Additionally, Cloud migration is an important step. So, to do it smoothly, required things during migration should be enlisted before the actual migration.

Here from the cloud security point of view –

– It is necessary to test the difference between encryption in transit and encryption at rest. This will tell you how Identity management will behave in a new cloud setup.

– Choose HTTPS, SSL, FTPS, and TLS, for encryption when it comes to transit for business.

– Cross-check if the previous provider was implementing strong encryption methods like advanced encryption standard (AES) or RSA when the data encryption is at rest. So the same tactic can be followed while migrating to secure data.

Furthermore, to protect your cloud from malware attacks and DDoS, confirm whether the provider facilitates you with protection for the same, like free SSL and FSTP.

These are the primary things. Once you secure your cloud with these practices, we can further tighten the screws by

1. Configure an integrated system to avoid any loopholes. For that, it must be ensured that the cloud provider is keeping you in the loop with the network’s security.

2. To test the workflow integration: So, when everything is all set, it is necessary to test the workflow to identify any discrepancies in the system to be eliminated at the very elementary stage.

3. Performing Pen testing. What does that mean? It is essentially, conducting mock cyber-attacks to observe how your setup responds and reacts. This at the same time will keep you aware of different kinds of attacks and routes that can be taken by hackers.

Other cloud security risks you need to worry about include:

Lack of Strategy and Architecture

Migrating an existing infrastructure to the cloud is not a simple lift-and-shift procedure. Here you need to make use of the native security controls already existing in the cloud. So, it is essential to build a robust security architecture in the cloud! No doubt, implementing a robust strategy and having the right security architecture is critical. It offers business a solid foundation to operate in the cloud and save critical business information and customer data.

Constant Innovation

Cloud migration offers many benefits like ease of implementing and rolling out new services and servers. But in cloud space, they are pushing out new services in the new servers and containers every other day. However, these are not always vetted by the security group. Hence, if you don’t have good controls in this space, this can be extremely risky for your investment.

So, having a plan with approved images for rolling out services is necessary to protect your cloud environment.

What are cloud security solutions?

Cloud security has many aspects and is highly dependent on the type of security you need to provide. The most important part is here how your organization will determine the risk profile they are going to accept and how to achieve it. Interestingly, Cloud is not all that different than on-premise in most ways. Here also you need to keep software patched and updated. Also, it must be configured correctly. It is essential to employ tactics like point to point encryption, commonly SSL/TLS/VPN, and encrypting data at rest.

The cloud security solutions that we can address here are like:

Proper communication and awareness of security threats is a cornerstone of cloud security. So, in your security plan, you should include sending alerts to the appropriate application managers as soon as a threat is identified. So steps can be taken by the proper entities, which will minimize the threat minimized.

Physical security

The servers must be located in a safe environment. So, if your cloud servers are located in a data center, you must ensure whether this data center is secure, reliable, and resilient enough. As per the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), data centers are classified based on the tiers. Usually, 4 tiers of data center design and implementation are mentioned. Every subsequent level (tier) of the data center provides more security and reliability.

Firewall

A firewall works as a barrier between a trusted network and an untrusted network. The firewall policy defines which traffic is allowed in the network. All other traffic is denied.

Intrusion detection system

Using an intrusion detection system, you can detect DoS attacks and intrusion. Besides, it can detect MySQL hacks and IIS so that you can respond timely against malicious traffic. It could be host-based or network-based intrusion detection systems.

Operating system

Every operating system needs to be updated with security patches daily.

Protocols

The access to servers might be restricted to secure protocols only. The most popular secure protocols are Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS), and Secure Socket Layer (SSL).

End-to-end encryption

End-to-end encryption prevents third-parties from accessing data while it’s transferred from one device to another.

Secure user access

User sessions have to be terminated after some period of inactivity. Users are forced to create strong passwords or passphrases, and multi-factor authentication is recommended for user login.

VPS (virtual private server)

It’s quite common that every user operates in a VPS, where additional services can be hosted, such as FTP, mail server, and other applications.

Data back-ups or data replication

If you are having your data back up, it’s easy to restore your data. Back up is a part of a disaster recovery plan. Check whether it is possible to have hourly back-ups of your data in case files are accidentally deleted, etc.

Additional aspects of Cloud that are different:

Checking Integration points — much of the power of the cloud comes from integrating software with other software. These integration points must be examined for security flaws. You must understand how those organizations are transporting and storing your data, whether they are outsourcing or subcontracting to parties that are invisible to you.

Access locations — traditional offices had data centers located within them or at another company-operated location. This allows for good physical security and the ability to filter access traffic down to certain locations. Cloud has largely changed this. Now employees access applications from all over (home, Starbucks, airports, etc.).

Outsourced security — when you purchase a cloud service, you’re purchasing their interpretation of the entire software stack below where you purchase. For IaaS, you’re buying the underlying physical platform; you can’t (generally) change what AWS or Azure does underneath; you can only buy what they built or not. If you buy SaaS, you are buying the physical, OS, platform, and configurations of all aspects. No changes, do you want the software or not?

How will cloud security change in the future?

As cloud-based services go mainstream, cloud security comes to close attention. When some technology is dealing with data, then security is a primary concern. As the cloud is becoming the source of transformation, at the same time, it makes opportunities for organizations to be more connected and agile.

Potential threats will increase

When you depend on some system, it becomes more viable concerning security. The same goes for cloud security too. With more dependency on the cloud, it is becoming a rich target of potential security threats. And no doubt, the vulnerable target is data stored in the cloud. With the increasing venture of the IoT, it provides an enormous threat to hackers. However, as the penetration attacks shoot up, so does the enhancement of the cloud security platform. We will witness the replacement of the password concept with biometrics. The cloud platform itself is being encrypted. And in this context, the role of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence is going to be paramount. More strict laws are going to be implemented by the government of various countries.

Cloud Security Predictions as per Gartner’s Recent Findings are described below:

Cloud Security for IoT

Since most IoT devices are cloud-based, it would expose networks and data to breaches if they are exploited. It is identified that by the year 2020, more than 25% of enterprise security attacks will involve IoT. It is estimated that 5-10% of IT security spending will be invested in monitoring such devices as required.

Threat Management and Vulnerability Management

Through the year 2020, 99% of vulnerabilities need to be patched on time. Failing to do so will cause money loss due to the damages caused to the systems and data theft.

Mobile & Network Security

By the year 2020, around 80% of new deals for  CASBs (cloud access security brokers) would be packaged with secure-web-gateways (or SWG), network firewalls, and web-application-firewalls (WAF) platforms. Traditional vendors of the conventional network would like to support their customers with SaaS application protections. Furthermore, this is effectively done by the CASBs.