Discuss about the Security Threats and Preventive Methods System.
Cloud computing is implemented in business for assuring users to use infrastructures and applications from any place, at any time. However, this innovation has been suffering from various legitimate security concerns.
The cloud is a relatively latest technology for the external world regarding its structure of a business model. Hence, it has to be a daunting challenge for protecting billions of internet devices worldwide.
The following report analyses the outline of the technology involved in cloud computing. Then the applications of cloud computing are demonstrated along with highlighting the problems and challenges in cloud computing. Next the gaps are identified from the discussion and lastly, the directions towards future research are highlighted by those gaps.
The cloud computing is an emerging concept in the current era of Information Technology. It is born out of the necessity of computing to go on. It helps users to access data, storage and application that are never stored on their machine. It can be understood as a kind of delivery system providing computing in the similar way in which any power grid supplies electricity (“Security and Privacy of Connected Vehicular Cloud Computing | IEEE Communications Society”, 2018). On an average for the computer users, it is a benefit to deliver IT instead on any user having detailed knowledge of this technology. It is a purpose-built architecture developed for supporting various computer users. The primary areas of operations addressed by the cloud are Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-service (SaaS).
It is a practical approach for experiencing direct cost benefits and has the potential to alter data centre from a set up which is capital-intensive to a variable priced environment. Its concept has been lying by fundamental principles of reusability of IT capabilities. It can be referred to as a pool of highly scalable, abstracted and controlled computing infrastructure which can host end-user applications (Zhao, Li & Liu, 2014).
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Key technologies |
Description |
Application of those technologies |
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Virtualization |
It is a method to deploy computing resources. This distinguishes the various levels of application systems. It includes storage, networking, data, software and hardware and many more. Further, it breaks the division among various data centre, data, networking, storage and servers and various physical devices |
It helps in realizing dynamic architecture. Further, it gains the goals to manage centralized and utilize physical resources and virtual resources dynamically. It improves the flexibility of systems, decreasing the cost and improves the service and decreases the risk of management (Khan & Tuteja, 2015). |
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Mass Distributed Storage |
For assuring high credibility and economy, the technology of cloud computing adopts a distributed storage for saving data, utilizing redundancy storage ensure the reliability of stored data |
This is done using high credible software making up incredibility of hardware. This it delivers the reliable and cheap mass distributed storage and a computing storage system. The data storage systems of this innovation are Hadoop Distributed File System or HDFS and Google File System or GFS. Hadoop team develops it (Huang et al., 2015). GFS is a distensible distributed system of a file used in large and distributed applications needed to access extensive data. HDFS is also a distributed system of file applicable for running on different commodity hardware. This is same as the conventional distributed file system and has a significant difference. For instance, it is highly tolerant towards faults and can run on cheap hardware. Further, it provides data access with massive throughput and it applies to an application on datasets of enormous scale (Gariba & Van Der Poll, 2018). |
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Parallel programming model |
It helps users to use cloud computing resources effectively and enjoy services brought about by cloud computing. The programming model of cloud computing makes task scheduled with a parallel execution which is transparent to programmers and users |
Here, the cloud computing adopts the MapReduce model of programming. This decomposes activities in various subtasks. This is done through two steps named “Map” and “Reduce” realizing allocation and scheduling on a node of large-scale (Tari et al., 2015). |
Any discussion involving cloud technology must point out the cases of privacy and security as it comes to manage sensitive data. Through leveraging remote cloud based infrastructure organizations outsources all the things possessed by it. This makes cloud service providers safeguard and manage to underpin hardware infrastructure for deployment (Jouini & Rabai, 2016). However, remote access is the responsibility and no such system is secure. There are always various vulnerabilities present towards attack. Every component is potentially accessible from the Internet in cloud computing. Hence any connected to the Internet is not entirely secure. Best teams also have the experience to be suffered from those severe attacks and security breaches.
Utilizing cloud-powered technologies indicates that the organizations require providing services with access to significant data for business. Being public opens the door for cloud service providers towards security challenges every day. Ease to procure and access cloud services provides chances to nefarious users the capabilities of scanning, identification and exploiting vulnerabilities and loopholes in any system (Luna et al., 2015). For example, at any multi-tenant cloud architecture in which multiple users are hosted on one server, the hackers can break into data of other users stored and hosted on the similar servers. Whatsoever, those loopholes and exploits have not been likely to surface and a likelihood of compromise has not been significant. (Chang & Ramachandran, 2018)
The various security problems in this area involve data breaches, insufficient access, credential and identity management, insecure interfaces and APIs or Application Programming Interfaces. Further, there are system vulnerabilities, account hijacking, malicious insiders, APTs or Advanced Persistent Threats, faulty due intelligence and data loss. Also, there has been nefarious use and abuse of cloud services, attacks from DoS or Denial of Services, spectre and meltdown and vulnerabilities and shared technology.
Lastly, it must be reminded that contrary to primary responsibilities to protect corporate data in the cloud has never been lying only with the services providers. The cloud customers are also included in this. The current age is in the transition period of cloud security where the focus has been a shift from provider to a customer (Kazim & Zhu, 2015). It has helped the enterprises to learn a considerable amount of period spent to figure out whether any specific cloud service has been secure or has not possessed any payback virtually.
It has been clear from the above discussion that cloud computing has been bringing significant cost savings for the organizations and eradication of the necessity to purchase and control data centers. It is helpful to bring complete access to systems, applications, data and services over the Internet. Further, it has provided the users to work distantly from various other locations around the globe and it has been more accessible and more cost-effective regarding scaling the environments.
First of all the above discussion helped in understanding that there are issues regarding data breaches. Cloud providers are an attractive target for hackers to intrude to extensive data stored over clouds. Severities of attacks are dependent on data confidentiality that can be exposed. Data exposed might be financial or others vital to damage can turn out be severe as the detected data is personal (Rasheed, 2014). This might be related to intellectual property, trade secrets and health information of any individual of any organization. Generating severe damage is helpful. Cloud suppliers convey security controls ensuring the surroundings.
The next issue is regarding network security. The security of data is taken enterprise under SaaS and other processes. It is stored by SaaS providers. To do away with leakage of confidential data at online, the internet must be kept secure. Secure network traffic encryptions are involved in securing a network for traffic. For the above demonstration points out that there are issues regarding data locality. The consumers have been using SaaS applications under SaaS environment as provided by the SaaS providers along with the processing of data (Narula & Jain, 2015). Moreover, the security concerns have been giving birth to problems like data access. Data over clouds have been accessible at any time and anywhere and from any system. Further, cloud storages have a problem with accessing data from any machine. Here information breaks and various kinds of assaults have been flourishing in situations with poor verification of clients and with frail passwords.
However, the above analysis has overlooked shared dangers and shared technologies. Administrations running from cloud reinforcement to the complete framework, applications and stages have been running an administration. Here, the suppliers are needed to plan to engineer for solid separation under multitenant designs (Duncan & Whittington, 2016). Here fruitful assault over any client has been sufficiently terrible. Any multitenant attacks spreading from one client to thousands have been a debacle. As one looks at multitenant administrations and cloud suppliers, it must be assured that they have been executing multifaceted validation over a server and do tasks on present-day interruption frameworks of locations.
Further, the study has mentioned about user control. It is a legal issue and can also be raised by consumers. Every SaaS environment has been offering the control over data of consumer to a service provider. Here data control and visibility have been restricted. In this case, there is always the scope of a threat of data to be stolen since consumers never the control over the cloud (Terzi, Terzi & Sagiroglu, 2015). Also, data transparency has been missing here like the place where the data is stored, who has the authority to own it and the way it can be used. Besides, data exposure has also been possible while data transferring goes on as various countries have been implementing the law to access data as they found that distrusting.
Putting data over cloud has been involving loss of legal protection of privacy. Hence, it has been impossible for following every legislation for cloud computing. Additional policies can force exposure of data to third parties. Various locations have been possessing clear laws of protection of privacy of those users (Aikat et al., 2018). At best, data within cloud has been highly unclear according to locality. In the worst case scenario, nature of the instantaneous and ambiguous data has been flowing around borders making privacy laws hard to enforce.
From the above study, two aspects are chosen to be the most vital issue. The first one is the problems due to lack of sufficient legal protection regarding privacy. Regulatory authority and constitutional rights to privacy protection for cloud computing users have not been still well defined. Supreme Court of Australia has not resolved the issue entirely about unwarranted disclosure of various consolidated private data (Ryoo et al., 2014). Users have possessed no legitimate expectation of privacy within data that is voluntarily turned over for third parties. On the other hand, what an individual seeks to preserve as private in the areas accessible to the public has been constitutionally protected.
Another issue that is needed to address adequately is network security. It has been a matter of a struggle for organizations to move towards cloud computing. This happens long before they possess the proper tools, processes and skills in place. There has been a big leap of faith taking place between conventional network security and cloud security. The different security professionals have been tending to be network huggers (Gionta et al., 2014). However, layer 3 and four packet filtering and security controls have been applicable while the workloads get hosted on different heterogeneous cloud platforms. Different conventional cybersecurity professionals have been moving beyond traditional mindset of packet processing for grasping security of cloud in reality.
The next business world has been equipped with more service offerings and providers crowding the space. Moreover, the cloud infrastructure that was limited previously to any single provider data centre is also on the rise (Kaufman, 2018).
Though identified, this informational privacy right has not been unlimited, and Australia’s Supreme Court is needed to define scopes of those types of privacy protection. Here, cloud computing services require considering the specific laws of data protection of Australia (Duncan, Bratterud & Happe, 2016). However, unlike conventional data storage, the clouds have not been anymore storing data of customers over any single computer. The most important directions for future research are highlighted below.
The above trends should be resulting in the necessity for various architectures of computing offered by future infrastructures of a cloud. The structures are anticipated to affect areas like connecting devices and people, service spacing, different data-intensive computing and self-learning systems (Xing, Xiong, Qian, Medhi & Huang, 2018).
Conclusion:
Despite rapid growth, the nature of cloud computing has been introducing a possibility of severe various security breaches of cloud drastically affecting a business. Here, data security has been one of the primary concerns for today’s IT professionals. The above study shows that the requirements of security have been including authorization, authentication, data privacy and multi-tenancy and data encryption. Those security requirements are needed to be mapped to various cloud services for achieving coherence and integrity within the cloud system. Thus, the study has analysed security in cloud computing and presented an overall explanation of the problems that are not addressed in the prior discussion. Lastly, future research directions are proposed that are well formulated and able to answer every gap identified.
References:
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