A report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) highlights the cloud computing threats that are most likely to cause businesses problems in the coming years. IT managers must understand these threats in order to mitigate them since cloud computing is quickly becoming the standard way to run many parts of business IT.
The explosive growth of the cloud has a lot to do with midsize businesses and how these organizations saw the potential that the fledgling technology held for leveling the playing field between businesses of all sizes. The early barriers to the cloud have mostly been cast aside, but businesses are now finding that there is a whole new crop of issues — mostly regarding security — that have to be addressed when venturing into the cloud.
The CSA was established in 2008 to raise awareness of the cloud's security issues and has released a report on the nine top cloud computing threats that businesses have faced over the past year and will continue to face in the immediate future. The whole list of nine is detailed in an InformationWeek article and is good reading for any IT manager using or considering a cloud solution; but a handful of issues stand out as those to which midsize businesses will have to give special attention.
Data Loss
The issue of data loss, either through hardware failure or theft, has to be at the front of an IT manager's mind. The cloud does help to solve data loss through redundant data storage, but this solution unfortunately creates extra instances of the data and thus makes it more likely that a theft will occur. Major cloud vendors continue to work on securing the cloud, and in some cases, data will be safer with a security-minded cloud vendor than in a private data center; but IT managers must understand the risk to data when leveraging the cloud. Contingency plans are a necessity whenever a third party is in charge of so much valuable data.
API Issues
CSA also lists emerging application programming interface (API) vulnerabilities as a major threat, and it is an issue about which security researchers are worried as well. APIs, which control how other programs connect and interact with these cloud computing applications, are now notorious for being lax about security. There are emerging security standards in this area, such as OAuth, but it remains to be seen just how secure a communications interface can truly be. For now, IT managers have to be sure that their cloud vendors are aware of potential issues and have taken steps to prevent them. For complete post see here
