Tech Lover 9

As the things are unfolding it seems to be unavoidable for businesses but to move to cloud environment to survive in a competitive business condition. However, for many businesses still the idea of hosting important data, files and business applications on a third-party setup is intimidating. The news stories in the past about security breaches, hacker attacks etc. have only worsen the already dwindling confidence on cloud. However, the situation has started to take a positive turn with cloud hosting service providers strengthening the security features of their service model. There is also a new set of companies emerging that offer cloud computing consultation to organizations for smooth and secured cloud transition.

The reasons to worry

The reasons to worry about moving to cloud are emerging from two different areas:

Relinquishing control over data: When the information is hosted on cloud the internal IT team has very little control over it. In the multi-tenant environment of public cloud both infrastructure and security is shared between users. It makes monitoring the performance of the hosted information difficult. It has caused a lot of panic among organizations. Public cloud in particular is kind of a soft target for hacker attacks, spear-phishing, rubber hose and malwares.

Compliance: Another hurdle arising from government laws regarding data security and physically storing data outside its geographical location. Both EU cyber security agency ENISA and the American Federal authority (the Internet’s Patriot Act) are exercising stricter compliance standards to ensure data security on cloud environment.

How to securely migrate data to cloud

Encrypting files: Encrypt your files before transporting them to cloud – making sure that the decryption keys aren’t stored along with. Client’s side encryption, when the files are on transit as well as when stored in vendor’s server, is a good way to ensure data security on cloud. You can opt for either complete data encryption or encrypt only the mission-critical data. This can easily be done using encryption tools like TrueCrypt or BoxCryptor.

Using passphrase: Another way to ensure file security on cloud is by adding passphrases to them. Users will need to insert passwords every time to access the files. You can also allow users to create, change and update their respective passwords and security questions. Password protection can be applied to files that are not encrypted.

Authorizing users: You can categorize users into different groups and set authority levels accordingly. You can also put a trigger that will alert you every time a file is downloaded or uploaded in your virtual environment. You can define access like viewing, editing, modifying, deleting, removing etc for users.