With rising popularity of cloud computing, the number of personal cloud users is increasing every year. Cloud computing is also becoming preferred choice for web and web applications, and now every application wants to be on the Cloud.In the year 2012, Gartner also predicted the complete shift from offline PC work to mostly on-cloud by 2014 and now it is happening. The increasing usage of data over the Cloud has attracted cyber criminals from around the world towards the Cloud; therefore, the need for Cloud Security is also growingrapidly. In this article, we have listed five top threats for the cloud computing that every business should know.
1. Data Loss
Data loss occurs when a disk drive does not work or completely dies without its owner having created its backup. This threat also occurs when owner of the encrypted data loses the key that unlocks the encrypted data. In the year 2011, small amounts of data were lost for some customers of Amazon Web Service, as its EC2 cloud suffered “a re-mirroring storm” due to human operator error. The data loss can also occur intentionally in the event of a malicious cyber attack.The prospect of permanently losing one’s data is terrifying for both consumers and businesses; however, there are many successful techniques to prevent data loss.
2. Data Breaches
The data breach results in the loss of credit card or other personal information.It is one of the startling thefts that takes place during the normal processing and storage of data. With increasing use of cloud computing, the new avenues of attack have been introduced significantly. While data leakage and data loss are both serious threats to the cloud computing, the measures to diminish one of these threats can exacerbate the other threat.
3. Insecure APIs
IT administrators rely on interfaces for cloud provisioning, orchestration, management, and monitoring. APIs are integral to availability and security of general cloud services. From there, third parties and organizations are known to build on these interfaces, injecting add-on services. This brings in the complexity of new layered API; but it also increases security risk, as organizations may be required to give their credentials to these third parties so as to enable their agency.
4. Denial of Service
Denial of service or DoS ranks as one of the greatest security threat to the cloud computing. It has been an Internet threat for many years, but this threat becomes more problematic in the age of modern cloud computing when the organizations are dependent on the 24X7 availability of one or more services. For the cloud customers, experiencing this cyber attack is like being caught in rush-hour traffic gridlock. There is no way to get to the destination, and nothing customers can do about it except sit and wait.
5. Malicious Insiders
Malicious insiders can be a former or current employee, a business partner or a contractor who gains access to a system, network, or data for the malicious purposes. One tipthat cloud customers should use to protect themselves from this threat is to keep their encryption keys on their own premises, not in the cloud.
These five security threats are the greatest threat for the cloud and web application security. Every organization should aware of these threats. Organizations can also take help from the network audit companies so as to make their cloud computing work more secure and safe.
