Managing the Risks When Moving to a Cloud Platform-as-a-Service

Cloud computing systems are the way of the future; they’re convenient and save companies lots of money. Enterprise secrets and personal information are now stored up in the cloud and can be accessed by employees anywhere.

But the convenience of the massless cloud also leaves you vulnerable to hackers. Now that the access points are virtually unlimited, hackers can literally come at you from anywhere and steal invaluable information from your cloud.

These hacks happen on both a personal and a corporate level. Back in 2009, a botnet was found inside Amazon Web Services that was stealing passwords. More recently, private celebrity photos were stolen from iCloud and shared with the world.

With enterprises like banks moving over to cloud platforms, there is a significant constant threat of danger coming from hackers all over the world.

The danger exists with both public and private cloud platforms. They both share information across many points inside their network and from mobile devices. The most vulnerable time for information to be hacked is when you move your regular servers into the cloud because that data is not meant for the cloud.

Firewalls are also much less effective in the cloud. “They are now fundamentally irrelevant,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, Vice President of Strategy at IBM Security Systems. “The notion of a perimeter, where your computing begins and ends, is obliterated in the cloud.”

One of the biggest reasons why cloud hacks are becoming more common is because it’s easy. At the Black Hat security conference last year, two researchers demonstrated how to build a cloud-based botnet by using the free-trial offers from a few cloud-based businesses.

As hacks go up, attention and development of cloud security is also making progress. Companies like Microsoft and Google have some of the best security engineers in the world and are working tirelessly to make cloud more secure.

Another thing that is good about cloud security is the conversion of core computing systems into clouds means that computers will be better managed and security flaws will be patched and inspected more uniformly.

Converting to cloud comes with risks but over time, the benefits of cloud will severely outweigh the risks if they don’t already.