Cloud computing is one of the top technologies that have been gaining widespread acceptance by small and big organizations alike. As result, organizations nowadays host most of their applications and systems somewhere on the clouds. Besides, they abundantly consume readily available services from the cloud service providers (CSP). Moreover, according to some studies, the preference and adoption of clouding computing is still growing and even the trend seems moving towards Everything as a Service (XaaS) paradigm.
However, cloud computing is not without security threats and concerns. Likewise traditional computing, cloud computing environments face imminent dangers of data breach and privacy threats. Moreover, these cloud security challenges demand heightened cooperation between the provider and the consumer. Without the collaboration of the providers and consumers, it is really difficult to tackle the myriad cloud security threats organizations face, if not impossible. Therefore, the cloud threat landscape demands absolute understanding and unrelenting involvement of the consumers and providers in order to establish appropriate safeguards.
What do you think are the inherent dangers of cloud computing that we must pay attention to then? Let us discuss some of the possible cloud threats to data security as follows:
- Data Breaches: A data breach occurs when confidential data mistakenly falls under the control of wrong entity and viewed by an unauthorized person. This is one of the top and costly cloud security concerns and entities must work hand-in-hand to avoid it. Because, the compromise of the data in the clouds will not be an issue that can be just handled according to the SLAs only. Rather it will be subject to ruthless and strictly comprehensive compliance and regulatory requirements, especially if it contains private data such as PII, and PHI.
- Hijacking of Accounts: Account hijacking is a common threat even in the traditional IT infrastructures. It occurs when an unauthorized entity gains access to privileged accounts while it traverses the networks or while at rest in the cloud storage. Furthermore, threat agents will use the hijacked account to commit further nefarious attacks likewise denying legitimate users access to their accounts and associated services. Attack vectors hijack accounts in cloud environments due to flawed software, loopholes, insecure encryption algorithms, and other vulnerabilities.
- Insider Threat: Malicious insider threats that come from disgruntled employees, dishonest contractors and partners pose the greatest dangers to the wellbeing of organizational assets. This is very true with cloud-based deployments as well and requires stringent security controls in place.
- Data Loss: It is one of the most common threats to cloud security. Furthermore, this threat makes cloud environments vulnerable to reputational damages, services disruptions, and compliance and regulatory liabilities. Additionally, it may occur due to intentional and accidental actions of entities. In cloud platforms, the customers entrust the providers to take care of their organizational data. Thus, there will be different ways that may cause data loss and thereby compromise organizations.
- Misconfigurations: Cloud environments require extensive configuration works and change management controls. Misconfiguration therefore may cause data breaches and losses that may threaten services in cloud platforms. Even though most activities in the cloud are automated, yet it demands utmost precautions when configuring and making changes to services.
- Insecure Interfaces and APIs: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and plugins, in addition to virtualization technologies, are the building blocks of cloud environments. Because, cloud service providers (CSP) expose and enable their services to consumers mostly through APIs and plugins. Insecure interfaces and APIs between the providers and customers may therefore be attack surfaces for further compromise and data breaches.
- Cloud Services Abuse: Most cloud providers are established for profit and pay less attention to whom they provision their services as far as one pays the bills and abides by the SLAs. Moreover, the on-demand self-service characteristics of cloud computing typically makes it harder for the cloud provider to evaluate who is using their service and for what purpose. The bad guys exploit this and other characteristics of cloud environment to abuse it and launch further attacks using the massive computing services available in the cloud.
The cloud computing threat landscape changes dramatically. Hence, cloud providers and consumers alike should always have watching-eyes on potential threats that may cripple or at least severe their services.