Being the entirely new shift in the dimensions of information technology, cloud computing has offered new potential, innovation and paradigm to the industry verticals. Whole industry is now very much excited from the agility and on-demand provisioning of computing offered by the cloud vision. Among all the rejoice and nice swings, one thing that is still haunting the experts is the associated risks and strategies to fight with.
The risks and threats are of the same extent both for the cloud service providers and cloud customers as well. The article is a comprehensive coverage of the industry standards that deal with the industry practices in order to secure cloud computing environment. Various organizations that deal in the domain of cloud computing have a very comprehensive approach to manage cloud guidance strategies. Below illustrated are the threats associated with the cloud computing:
Abusive and Flagrant use of Cloud Computing
The cloud environment offers several added utilities to the users including unlimited bandwidth and and storage capacity to run the applications smoothly. Some providers even allow other benefits like free limited trial periods and additional usage. These user models frequently come under the security threats and malicious attacks. The areas where these attacks could have the bigger impacts Future areas of concern includes decoding and cracking of the password, launching potential attack points and executing malicious commands. You may protect your application from the threat by:
- Applying stringent registration and validation processes
- Performing more deliberate monitoring and coordination throughout the computing platform
- Analyzing the customer network traffic.
- Monitoring network blocks
Serious breach in interfaces and APIs
Cloud computing users have smooth access of a comprehensive set of software interfaces or APIs manage and execute internal communication with cloud services. These APIs play an integral part during Provisioning, management, orchestration, and monitoring of the processes running in the cloud environment. It’s recommended to monitor the authentication and access control and other associated encryption and activity monitoring policies to prevent any malicious attack. There exists many ways in which you can prevent such breach:
- Security model analysis of cloud APIs
- Strong authentication and access controls
- API dependency chain evaluation
Insider threats and attacks
These kind of attacks and breaches are done due to the lack of transparency into the cloud provider s delivery mechanism and procedure. Any superficial command over the level of access could lead to various adversaries like corporate hacking and organized business threats in the domain of business verticals. You can prevent such cloud computing threats by:
- Applying overall information security
- Full fledged compliance reporting
- Effective breach notification processes