How Secure Is the Cloud?

Insecurities of the cloud can affect companies as well as individuals. Many enterprises in the past have always maintained that the cloud security is not upto the mark and has sometimes proved detrimental to their business interests.

Cloud security skeptics were given much to rant about when iCloud faced a massive leak of celeb photos on the net and when a major journalist's account was hacked with malicious intent.

The question remains: How secure is information that is stored in the cloud, really?

But the fact remains that nearly 80 percent of businesses worldwide, according to a survey by the Ponemon Institute for Thales E-Security, are moving their critical and confidential data to the cloud.

Nearly half of the respondents' organizations have already opted with a cloud platform and about one-third of respondents are likely to transfer sensitive data to the cloud within some months or in a year or two.

Even the federal government is opting for the cloud to cut costs and become more responsive wherein nearly one-fourth of the federal government's estimated $80 billion in IT expenditure, is expected to be spent on cloud implementation.

Some respondents to the Ponemon survey did mention that cloud transfer of data did affect their business strategy negatively. But more than two-thirds of organizations mentioned that protection of sensitive data in the cloud is the responsibility of service providers. Most organizations have little or no knowledge about what measures their providers have put in place to protect data, the survey found.

With persistent encryption being applied to data before transferring it to the cloud, and also applied to the cloud environment, data on the servers is protected through security steps that are important to the system. Most companies have misconfigured systems, faulty passwords, shared accounts and other problems that security does become an issue. It is important for enterprises to look for good security standards and undertake ample measures of security whether or not on the cloud.

Large organizations usually have processes and procedures that make it difficult for hackers to perform a social engineering attack. Various measures need to be implemented by the users too for safeguarding their data.

Most analysts believe that including the cloud, the IT industry as a whole needs to adopt methodologies and technology for data security. Cloud services also have to implement some flexibility, which leaves the door open for social engineering and security robustness.

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