Businesses of all sizes are now integrating cloud services as a priority. It is helping businesses minimize their operational costs by sharing storage and computing resources. Following that, the managed service providers offer a pay-as-you-use model for their clients to attain control over how they use cloud resources.
But the misconfiguration of cloud security solutions is now becoming a leading cause of potential data breaches in the cloud. The posture management within the cloud is not up to par for several organizations. Thus, it fails to protect the cloud-based infrastructure.
Cloud computing is still a relatively new technology and is in its evolution stage. Hence, there are several undiscovered areas that trigger security, privacy, and trust concerns. In this article, you will get an insight into some of the challenges that commonly arise with the implementation of cloud computing.
1. Issues with Data Confidentiality
Data confidentiality is a major privacy, security, and trust issue when utilizing cloud services. When you use cloud computing, you are outsourcing and externalizing extremely critical business data to the cloud service provider. Hence, it is pretty obvious that people have second thoughts about it.
Users who lack the necessary authorization should not be able to access data. Hence, it is one of the ways to ensure that confidentiality is maintained through strict regulations and control policies.
Hence, people are refraining from trusting cloud service providers and considering data externalization a prime security concern. As a result, many companies are holding themselves back from migrating to cloud services.
2. Use of Insecure APIs and Interfaces
All cloud service providers tend to offer several interfaces and APIs for customers. All of these APIs and interfaces go through a proper documentation approach to be easily usable by their customers. But with this approach, potential issues get triggered if the customer hasn’t properly secured the interfaces with respect to the cloud infrastructure.
Cybercriminals can also use customer-specific documentation to find potential access points to the API or interface. Thus, it can be exploited to extract sensitive business data and compromise the cloud environment. Therefore, it is advised to always count on reputed cloud service providers, who ensure that the cloud security parameters are initiated from both ends.
3. Multi-Tenancy Security & Privacy Problems
A multi-tenancy system within cloud computing is when you follow a specific concept of sharing data storage apps, computational resources, and services among various tenants. These shared services will then be hosted on the same physical or logical platform by the cloud service provider.
The cloud service providers propose these plans to make more profit but are eventually putting their customers at risk. The cyberattackers will be using the loophole in the multi-tenancy system to launch several attacks to infiltrate the systems of co-tenants. Hence, this will create severe privacy issues.
Therefore, make sure you trust the right cloud service provider who has been in the industry for a considerable time. In that way, you will be able to save yourself from such privacy concerns.
4. Data Loss and Storage Problems
Cloud computing enables big data analytics, real-time processing, and storage solutions. There are evident benefits, but in contrast, data loss by cloud service providers has been in the news several times. It is one of the major security issues that cloud providers face, and customers experience the repercussions.
If the cloud service provider has a history of data theft or loss from their premises and systems, then many companies will eventually decline their services and reconsider their idea of putting their trust in cloud computing.
In 2019, the rate of cloud data breaches was 19%, which increased to 24% in 2020. It takes an average of 200+ days to identify any cloud breach and more than 70 days to contain or neutralize it. Based on this survey, around 68% of the businesses that used cloud computing and experienced a breach stated that sensitive data was leaked or exposed.
Following that, cloud infrastructure enables organizations to store their data across various geographical locations for easier disaster recovery approaches. But there is a possibility that the user’s data is stored somewhere outside of the legal jurisdiction.
Thus, it gives rise to the concern of users about the legal accessibility and regulations of that data, which is stored outside of their region. Moreover, there’s also a chance that local laws will be violated with such data storage approaches in the cloud.
5. Incident Response Concerns
Upon migrating to cloud services, companies get only partial ownership and visibility of their business infrastructure. As a result, this makes traditional in-house security tools and solutions ineffective.
With complete control of the internal network infrastructure, companies usually have strategies to deal with internal cybersecurity attacks. They have the liberty to shut down the incident within their reach by identifying the scope and determining immediate remedies.
But the lack of visibility and inefficiency of traditional in-house security measures trigger trust issues for companies. A lot of companies are concerned about how they can effectively perform incident response over the cloud.
The cloud infrastructure is very different from that of the in-house data center in terms of security. And it is also a fact that traditional security tools and strategies are not always efficient in terms of mitigating risks and neutralizing attacks.
Conclusion
The cloud definitely comes with a lot of business advantages. But there are potential loopholes and security or privacy issues. Thus, the trust factor isn’t completely built across all organizations in the modern era. But technology experts are working on filling the gaps, and most of the cloud service providers are taking adequate steps to ensure these problems don’t affect the privacy, security, or trust of organizations towards cloud computing.
To learn more about how cloud computing can be used to avoid these concerns, get in touch with STL Digital right away.
FAQs
1. What are the top security challenges associated with cloud computing?
The top security challenges that are associated with the cloud computing solutions offered by inefficient service providers include:
- Denial-of-Service attacks
- Unsecure points of access control
- Misconfiguration of the cloud security system
- Data loss due to neglected cyberattacks
- Inadequate threat alerts or notifications.
2. What are the types of security services that quality cloud computing guarantees to provide?
You must hire a reputed and renowned cloud service provider who takes optimal care of the trust, privacy, and security of the customer’s business infrastructure. When you do that, you will be able to experience the true potential of cloud computing for your business. Considering that, the different types of cloud security services provided to you are as follows:
- Device & Network strategy
- Security monitoring or alerting
- Disaster recovery
- Business continuity
- Legal compliance
- Governance
3. How many businesses around the world are using cloud computing solutions?
As of 2023, around 94% of all companies around the world were reportedly using cloud computing solutions. The market for the industry in 2021 was recorded at around $369 billion on a global scale. The demand rate is substantially high. And, with technology experts working on fixing these privacy gaps, its utilization will soon touch the 100% mark.
