Top threats for cloud computing

Cloud computing reached the point where computing functions as a utility. Here are the top cloud computing threats to help organizations better understand them and make the best choices for their businesses.

Threat no 1: Security threats

With cloud computing managing critical enterprise data, are enterprises and individuals possible victims of hacking and data loss? Although it is not a very common issue, this may occur. For this reason, adoption of cloud computing within industries such as healthcare and finance is not recommended by some. Some providers encrypt data at rest and have backups for customers’ data on tapes or disk drives, and destroy these after a while.

Threat no 2: Outages

Some of the most common outages that may occur are: data backup, down times, and data centers going offline. The good thing is that cloud outages can be predicted. The best method to solve problems with outages is to prevent them. I offered some examples of common outages and how to prevent them in the blog article What are the most common cloud outages and how to prevent them?.

Threat no 3: Malicious Insiders

Malicious insiders are dangerous both inside organizations and with cloud providers. A cloud provider may not reveal the type and level of access to physical and virtual assets of their employees or how it analyzes and reports on policy compliance. So, this means that the level of access granted could enable a malicious insider to harvest confidential data or gain control over the cloud services. However, this kind of information can be detailed in the Service Level Agreement and audit reports, if the customer asks for it.

Threat no 4: Lack of information

Although it may not look like a threat, lack of information regarding where the data center is stored, or what levels of security a data center has, may influence in a negative way cloud computing. I would also like to add this point as a lack of sufficient standards, because for both of these issues I see similar solutions. Although standards are established by worldwide recognized organizations, they are mentioned in the SLA (Service Level Agreement). So, in order to be informed about where your data is located and how it is managed, try to sign a detailed SLA with the provider. I also recommend you to read further on this topic in the Working on a cloud software Service Level Agreement blog article.

Where there is a threat, there is also a solution – at least most of the time. So, what are the top threats for cloud computing you confronted with? And what are the solutions you found?

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