We all upload files and documents to our One-Drive cloud storage. But do we what actually we mean by cloud computing?
Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and more—over the Internet. Sending emails, watch movies, playing games, whatever we do, cloud computing is behind it all. It does not require you to buy extra hardware components, thus bringing down your cost to store data. Not only so, it helps you to access your data from anywhere of the world ensuring better performance and reliability than common resources.
However, security plays a major role in cloud computing. Without good security, there is no stand of cloud computing. Cyber Threats and ransomware attacks are no match for cloud computing design-built from the ground up for information technology security. Two-thirds of large UK firms were targeted by cybercriminals in 2016.
While earlier, security mainly focused on preventing unauthorised user access, now it’s about stooping criminals from accessing a customer’s network and private data. It is now universally accepted that users must be protected and thus, while the complexity of cybercrime is on the rise, so too are our efforts to curb it.
Maintaining both privacy and protection is a major difficult task, only solutions bring to build a reliable and secure network infrastructure. And some security organisations are looking up to cloud computing to help in this endeavour and provide a leading run to detect and rule out previously unknown threats.
Studies reveal that by the time a present cyber-attack has been mitigated and dissolved, a new threat is already created and ready to attack another system. Only by using cloud computing services, it is possible to detect, analyse and compare unknown software with a variety of malware databases.
Other than the benefits of reduced cost and better performance, Cloud computing also provides inbuilt security that protect data regularly and automatically. Security measures by cloud computing also ensures that the client do not need to regularly update his software, thus bordering on better effectivity and lower impact on the system. Not only so, most cloud service providers offer various levels of encryption and automatic disaster recovery systems.
Many of us have seen our Facebook and social networking accounts being hacked, resulting mostly due to the insecurity of passwords. Cloud security do not use default passwords, rather a unique password is issued to each host system. Along with use, customers can also avail the two-factor authentication process, serving as a second round of verification. This second verification is mostly a code sent to a device that the user has set from before. Thus to hack the system, the criminal would not need the user name and password but also access to the device that has the second verifying code. This factor also reduces the risk of weak passwords in the system.
The standard encryption process of all devices is known as SD3+C. This is basically defined as “Secure by Design, Secure by Default and Secure in Deployment in Communications”. Cloud computing services adds a further layer of encryption over this SD3+C known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). This provides an encrypted link between the client and the server, where both must authenticate each other before any communication begins.
While cloud computing does appear to have the potential to tackle new and emerging cyber threats, it also appears that this alone will not be enough and needs to be paired with a comprehensive behavioural analysis capability to deal with zero-day threats and any periods where systems are offline.
