Grace Murphy
A few years ago, businesses started turning to the cloud and the available cloud storage solutions as a way to protect business data and essential files. Storing files in the cloud was seen as the more secure way of backing up important data and maintaining business operations.
Today, especially with business solutions already utilising cloud computing in a more native way, there are more challenges to safeguarding business cloud-based data that need to be solved. Anything from unauthorised access of data to data loss still threatens the wellbeing of businesses.
As the challenges evolve, so do the solutions. There are more ways to safeguard your business data and files that are already stored in the cloud. We are going to review the best security measures to use in this article.
Better Data Encryption
Encryption is now the standard security measure to implement if your business is storing data in the cloud. Cloud storage solutions and other cloud computing services are allowing users to use their own encryption keys and implement a more advanced set of security measures for the purpose of enhancing security.
The upside to this approach is protection against all unauthorised parties, including server admins. By using a private encryption key, even the server admins cannot access the business files stored in cloud clusters.
Where the data is encrypted also matters. Rather than encrypting data once they are stored in the cloud, the more secure way of protecting data is doing the encryption locally. The approach allows for maximum security, since files uploaded to the cloud are already in their encrypted form, protecting them from theft during data transmissions.
Secure Server Connections
Continuing with the previous point, data security doesn’t only cover the safety of your files in the cloud, but also information transmitted from and to the cloud cluster. When using cloud-based solutions, for instance, it is important that connections to the cloud server remain secure to prevent data from prying eyes.
There are several ways to protect data transmissions. Adding a layer of security to all data transmissions is the most basic measure to implement; it is a measure that must be implemented out of the box. A valid SSL certificate safeguards your communications with the server.
More advanced measures are also available. Some businesses opt for VPN tunnels to ensure end-to-end encryption as data is being transmitted to the cloud and back. The use of VPN, however, limits access to the cloud server. Only computers and devices with the correct VPN configuration can access the business cloud environment and solutions in it.
Redundancies and Recovery
The last piece of the puzzle in cloud-based data security is redundancy. While files in the cloud are more protected than when you store them on-site, it is still necessary to have multiple redundancies and to have backups in remote servers.
Fortunately, backup creation and maintenance services that run completely in the cloud are becoming more available. You can even unify multiple cloud environments and use an array of services as a way to distribute backup images and files across multiple clusters.
On top of that, there are Disaster Recovery as a Service or DRaaS solutions from top providers. This type of service offers maximum protection for VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines, enhancing business continuity and giving you that extra layer of protection against catastrophic disasters. UKCloud, a leading cloud solution provider, has the benefits of DRaaS explained in great detail.
DRaaS may even include fail-over options and the ability to journal changes made to the cloud environments and the information in them. The journaling feature alone, combined with good data practices, proper encryption, and other measures we discussed in this article, allows businesses to fully protect their sensitive information. Maintaining security for cloud-based data is a problem that can be solved with these measures.
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