The cloud infrastructure can be built on Public, Private, or Hybrid deployment models. But in all three cloud models, there is vulnerability and the possibility of compromised information. The cloud owners expect the cloud providers to manage their infrastructure but are sceptical about granting them direct access to their sensitive data.

Based on the cloud service models, there are different security issues faced by each of these. 

Software as a Service (SaaS)- SaaS enables anywhere access by deploying applications on the cloud infrastructure. But this anywhere access also poses a critical security risk. It is therefore essential to implement access control and identity management within the application. For instance, if you are working on Salesforce.com, it authorizes only certain salespersons to generate and edit reports using sensitive business data, while others can just view the reports. 

Platform as a Service (PaaS): PaaS provides a shared development environment, where the customer builds and manages the deployed applications but does not have control over the underlying cloud infrastructure. For example, on Microsoft™ Windows Azure, you can logically create and control your cloud deployment but without any access to the actual physical infrastructure. Since multiple users access the same physical infrastructure, this cloud model mandates strong authentication to identify users for audit trail.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): This Service model provides the provision of computing, storage, and network capabilities to the customer. The consumer also has control over operating systems and deployed applications. Nevertheless, it is the cloud provider that still manages and controls the underlying infrastructure. The data security in this model is a shared responsibility between the cloud provider and user.

With this shift in control, the need of the hour is to follow approaches and techniques to ensure that business and personal data remains private and secure. You must, therefore, include data encryption to prevent access to sensitive data to unwarranted personnel. 

Protecting the Data in the Cloud

The first step for data protection in a cloud environment is to follow conventional security standards. These include following best practices in implementing infrastructure, real-time security intelligence, data security protection, and preventing common security attacks. Apart from this, you need to maintain integrity, confidentiality, and availability in the cloud to prevent advanced threats.

Data Integrity: One of the critical components of cloud data security is data integrity. Data integrity includes completeness, accuracy, and consistency of data by preventing unauthorized modification or deletion of the original information. 

You can use various methodologies to maintain the integrity of data in the cloud, such as provable data possession (PDP) and high-availability and integrity layer (HAIL). Several other best practices help preserve data integrity like implementing data access control, monitoring user activities such as failed access attempts, modification and deletion of files, and unauthorized attempts to gain access to critical business data.

Data Confidentiality: Since user information is accessed from remote servers that are operated by third-party service providers, the risk of confidentiality of data is a major concern in implementing applications on the cloud. A single data confidentiality breach can break your customer’s trust as well as cause serious compliance issues, e.g. the GDPR.

You can do this by either categorizing your data based on its sensitivity or by using data masking. If you know precisely which data needs protection, you can set priorities and apply security controls based on the preference results. With data masking, you safeguard sensitive data by hiding it with other characters. 

Encryption is one of the first and foremost methods to mask confidential data. In absence of security keys, eavesdroppers or intruders trying to get hold of the data, can’t derive meaning out of the encrypted information. Other ways to ensure data confidentiality is two-factor authentication while accessing sensitive information and usage of strong passwords, device passcodes, etc.

Data Availability: Cloud computing revolutionized the technology space because it made sure the data is available at any time, anywhere over the internet. It opened up a plethora of options for how applications, products, or even infrastructure can be implemented as a service. 

These options would avoid outages and failures that commonly occurred with onsite, physical systems and servers. 

Generally, the cloud service provider guarantees high availability to its customer. So you must come up with an SLA to define your availability expectations and requirements to the cloud provider.

EndNote:

Although cloud computing infrastructure provides a host of advantages, data security has still been a major concern across the platform. Gartner in 2018 predicted that enterprises that implemented cloud computing along with the correct security policies would experience almost 60% fewer threats. 

It is also estimated that by the end of 2022, 95% of security threats or failures would be from incorrect security implementation from the customers. Since Cloud computing has changed how enterprise applications function, so any corporation that implements cloud today must also invest in a competitive, reliable, and flexible partner for cloud security