What Are The Risks And Challenges Of Cloud Computing? FutureUniverseTV Shares Deep Insights.
In almost all businesses, cloud computing has been incorporated to varying degrees. Despite this adoption of the cloud, organizations need to ensure that their cloud security strategy provides protection against the top threats to cloud security. The most common cause of cloud data breaches is misconfiguration of cloud security settings.
In addition, organizations using cloud-based infrastructure also lack complete visibility and control over their infrastructure, which means they must rely on security controls provided by their cloud service provider (CSP) for the configuration and security of their cloud deployments. A misconfiguration or security oversight can leave an organization’s cloud-based resources vulnerable to attackers, since many organizations are unfamiliar with securing cloud infrastructure and often have multiple cloud deployments – each with a different array of vendor-provided security controls.
A cloud-based deployment is outside the firewall and is directly accessible from the public internet, unlike an organization’s on-premises infrastructure. While this facilitates employee access to the cloud-based infrastructure, it can also make it easier for an attacker to gain unauthorized access to an organization’s cloud-based resources. An attacker can gain direct access to an organization through improperly configured security or compromised credentials, possibly without the organization’s knowledge.
There are many APIs and interfaces that CSPs provide to their customers that are insecure. A CSP’s customers are generally provided with well-documented interfaces in an attempt to make them as user-friendly as possible. A customer may experience issues if the interfaces for their cloud-based infrastructure are not properly secured. In addition to being used by the customer, the documentation can also be exploited by cybercriminals to find and exploit potential methods for gaining access to and leaking sensitive data from an organization’s cloud environment.
An account may be hijacked. A significant number of individuals have extremely weak password security, including the reuse of passwords and the use of weak passwords. Due to this problem, phishing attacks and data breaches are exacerbated as a stolen password may be used on multiple accounts. It is becoming increasingly common for organizations to rely on cloud-based infrastructure and applications for core business functions, and account hijacking is one of the more serious cloud security issues.
It is possible for an attacker to access sensitive data or functionality using an employee’s credentials, while compromised customer credentials allow for full control of the customer’s online account. Also, in the cloud, organizations are not always capable of identifying and responding to these threats as effectively as in on-premises environments. The organization’s cloud-based resources reside outside its corporate network and are hosted on infrastructure that is not owned by the organization.
Due to this, many traditional tools for gaining network visibility are not effective in cloud environments, and some organizations lack cloud-based security tools. A company may be limited in their ability to monitor and protect their cloud-based resources from attacks as a result of this. Data sharing with external parties The cloud is designed to make data sharing as convenient as possible. A number of cloud services enable you to invite collaborators explicitly via email or share a link that enables anyone with the URL to access the shared resource. Despite the fact that this easy data sharing is an asset, it can also pose a significant security risk for the cloud.
Since link-based sharing is more convenient than explicitly inviting each intended collaborator, it is difficult to control access to the shared resource. Shared links can be forwarded to others, stolen as a result of a cyberattack, or guesses by cybercriminals, providing unauthorized access to the resource. In addition, link-based sharing makes it impossible to revoke access to just a single recipient. Any organization is vulnerable to malicious insider threats.
Several sensitive resources are already accessible to malicious insiders through an organization’s network. It is these attempts that reveal most attackers to their targets, making it difficult for an unprepared organization to detect malicious insiders. Malicious insiders are even more difficult to detect in the cloud. In the context of cloud computing, companies lack control over the underlying infrastructure, resulting in a reduction in the effectiveness of many traditional security solutions. Additionally, cloud-based infrastructure can be accessed directly from the public Internet and is frequently misconfigured with respect to security.
How cyberattacks works. Cybercrime is a business, and cybercriminals choose their targets in accordance with their expected profitability. In addition to being directly accessible from the Internet, cloud-based infrastructure is usually inadequately secured, and contains a great deal of sensitive and valuable information. A successful attack on the cloud may in addition be repeated many times with a high probability of success due to its widespread use by many different companies. Therefore, organizations’ cloud deployments are common targets of cyberattacks.
Attacks resulting in a denial of service. It is essential for many organizations to be able to conduct business through the cloud. Cloud computing is used to store and run business-critical data as well as important internal and customer-facing applications. Consequently, a successful Denial of Service (DoS) attack against cloud infrastructure is likely to have a significant impact on a number of different organizations. Due to this, DoS attacks that demand a ransom to stop the attack pose a significant threat to the cloud-based resources of an organization.
Loss or leakage of data. Data stored within cloud-based environments can be easily shared. It is possible to share data easily with other parties in these environments via direct email invitations or by sharing a public link to the data, and these environments are accessible directly from the public Internet. It is important to note that the ease of data sharing in the cloud, while a major asset and key to collaboration, raises serious concerns regarding data loss and leakage. Sixty-nine percent of organizations are concerned about cloud security. A public link or setting a cloud-based repository to public can make data accessible to anyone who has access to the link, and there are tools available for searching the Internet for such unsecured cloud deployments.
Data Privacy and Confidentiality. Many organizations are concerned about data privacy and confidentiality. Data protection regulations such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Health Insurance Portability and Accessibility Act (HIPAA), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and many more mandate the protection of customer data and impose strict penalties for data breaches. It is also essential for organizations to maintain competitive advantage to maintain a large amount of internal data. In addition to the advantages of storing this data in the cloud, 66% of organizations are concerned with security concerns.
A large number of organizations have adopted cloud computing, however they may lack the knowledge to ensure that both they and their employees are using it in a secure manner. Thus, sensitive data is at risk of being exposed – as illustrated by the large number of breaches of cloud data.
Credentials that have been accidentally exposed. Cloud applications and environments are frequently used by phishers as a pretext for phishing attacks. It has become increasingly common for employees to receive emails with links asking them to verify their account credentials before being able to access a particular document or website due to the increasing use of cloud-based email (G-Suite, Microsoft 365, etc.) and document sharing services (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive). As a result, cybercriminals are able to easily obtain an employee’s cloud credentials.
44% of organizations are concerned about accidental exposure of cloud credentials since it could compromise the privacy and security of their cloud-based data and other resources. The response to internal cybersecurity incidents is an integral part of many organizations’ incident response strategies. Since all of the organization’s internal network infrastructure is owned by the organization, and security personnel are on site, it is possible to lock down the incident.
In addition, because the company owns its infrastructure, the company has the visibility necessary to identify the scope of the incident and take appropriate remediation measures. When a company uses cloud-based infrastructure, it has only partial visibility and ownership of their infrastructure, which makes traditional processes and security tools ineffective.
As a result, some of companies are concerned about their ability to respond effectively to incidents in the cloud. Regulatory and Legal Compliance Data protection regulations such as PCI DSS and HIPAA require organizations to demonstrate that they limit the access to protected information (credit card information, patient records, etc.). In order to accomplish this, the organization’s network could be physically or logically isolated in a way that only employees with a legitimate need for this information can access it. In the cloud, achieving and demonstrating regulatory compliance can be more challenging when moving data protected by these and similar regulations.
Cloud deployments provide organizations with limited visibility and control over some layers of their infrastructure. As a result, some of organizations consider legal and regulatory compliance to be a major cloud security issue and require specialized solutions to achieve compliance.
Data Sovereignty, Residency, and Control. There are typically a number of data centers distributed geographically among cloud providers. Thus, cloud-based resources are more accessible and perform better, allowing CSPs to maintain service level agreements even in the face of business-disrupting events, such as natural disasters and power outages. Many organizations which store their data in the cloud have no idea where their data is actually stored within a CSP’s data center network. As a result, 37% of organizations are concerned about the sovereignty, residence, and control of their data. Regulations such as the GDPR place restrictions on where EU citizens’ personal information may be sent, so using a cloud platform whose data centers are located outside of the permitted areas may result in an organization being in noncompliance with regulatory requirements.
Moreover, different jurisdictions have different laws regarding access to data for law enforcement and national security purposes, which may impact an organization’s customers’ data privacy and security. Cloud computing offers many advantages to organizations, but it also poses a number of security threats and concerns. A cloud-based infrastructure differs greatly from a data center that is physically located on-premises, and traditional security tools and strategies are not always effective in protecting it.
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