Why Is Cloud Security Such a Big Challenge?

Cloud is the latest buzzword across the IT environment. Organizations are flocking in for migrating their business platforms from legacy systems to the cloud because the cloud ecosystems can provide advanced analytics for modern techniques like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, etc. It is also a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution that can provide quick and easy access. 

But one of the concerns about the cloud is around cloud and data security, especially during the cloud migration process. 

Today’s data-driven business world demands flexibility in terms of availability and accessibility of data across different platforms. As cloud infrastructure can be shared among multiple users, data accessibility in the cloud is a concern. Organizations use several technologies and multiple platforms like the public, private and hybrid cloud which can make it difficult to monitor data, detect anomalies and control unauthorized access. Now, reputed cloud vendors like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have solved these problems by implementing access control mechanisms. However, some underlying glitches must be carefully handled during cloud migration and implementations.

Data Security concerns need to considered during cloud migration:

Data leakage:

The flow of confidential business-critical information out of your on-premise environment is known as Data Leakage. Data Security of organization can be at stake if Data Leakage occur:

• During the transfer of data from on-premise to cloud and vice versa
• During the transfer of data from one data center to another data center of the Cloud provider over the public internet
• Unauthorized physical access to data warehouse  at the Cloud providers data center
• Data access by other tenants in the shared infrastructure environment
• Cyber-attack by hackers who find vulnerabilities in the cloud services.

Data loss: 

Data loss in business can occur because of

• Physical infrastructure failure – Disk failure, data center failure, disk damage, etc.
• Mismanagement of data (Loss of encryption keys etc.) at the cloud provider’s end.

Service unavailability:

• Cloud Managed services going down and impacting business

Securing the cloud ecosystem is crucial to save business-critical information such as corporate and customer data. Any loss in data can adversely affect the organization’s reputation with heavy penalties. 

Hence, implementing appropriate controls such as data encryption, data masking, data ingestion security, access control, authentication and authorization, access node security, firewall installation etc. can ensure data confidentiality and integrity, thus securing your cloud ecosystem effectively. 

It is critical to ensure optimum checks while migrating the data, to ascertain a secured foundation of your modern data platform. 

Datametica helps in data warehouse migration, modernization and building highly secured data lakes and analytics solutions on the cloud.