Against the trend or to conform to the tide how to look at cloud storage security

The application of cloud computing will inevitably require cloud storage to provide storage security for cloud information, so cloud storage is an inevitable trend of social development and technology development. Cloud storage is now a tangle of various pros and cons of the state, like people without scruple in use, while the relatively cautious people while looking at the convenience of cloud storage, while observing the security threats of cloud storage.

Cautious people are not alarmist, this year, Amazon, Google and so on the world's largest transport service providers, successive, frequent downtime and other accidents, and then bring users inconvenience, some even caused the user permanent data loss.

What is cloud storage

Cloud storage is a service that provides configurable virtualized storage and related data over the network. The implication of cloud storage is storage virtualization and storage automation. It is web-based and can be configured and on demand, and is a virtualized storage and data management.

The advantages of cloud storage

Cloud storage services offer many fairly tempting advantages. It can be paid by volume, without capital expenditure, and users will not need to purchase other devices even if storage requirements increase later. You can dynamically adjust your storage capacity and simply pay for the actual capacity you use.

In the short and long term, the biggest feature of cloud storage services is that they can reduce costs for small businesses. They don't have to buy hardware and software, they don't have to hire professional it people, they don't need to think about subsequent upgrades, and so on. For all users, cloud storage can better back up local data and can process day-to-day data offsite. At the same time, employees can access the data they need anywhere, without having to worry about the barrier of internal and external networks.

Cloud storage Threats

The threat of cloud storage services is primarily identity authentication and access control issues that can lead to the counterfeiting and theft of data or stored information. The second risk is the confidentiality of data storage and transmission. Business data and personal data, if placed in this cloud storage can not guarantee the confidentiality of information in the storage and transmission process, there may be a large number of business information and privacy disclosure problems.

Third, the problem of data isolation, for different cloud users, the cloud storage system is a similar physical system, no longer like the traditional network has the physical isolation and protection of the boundary, there is a virtual system is Cross-border Access can not guarantee the information isolation of the problem. The other is to apply security, for cloud applications running on cloud storage platforms, if they do not follow security rules or have application security vulnerabilities, can cause problems such as the illegal access or destruction of cloud storage data.

Copyright risk can not be ignored, some individuals or groups will be the main film and television music as the subject of the file through the cloud storage client upload to the network, and then through the sharing of the way to provide downloads in the circle, a large number of copyrighted video music by this special pirate way to spread.

In addition, the personal privacy disclosure of cloud storage is also a concern for senior people, there are many mobile platform users like to use their own mobile phone or flat-screen photos and video through the cloud storage quickly uploaded to the network, each of your uploaded photos or other documents may be stored in clear text, Administrators can view and delete user uploaded files directly from the server's platform, which is a user's confidential document or user's privacy.

Finally, we have to consider the operation of the end of the trouble, in the current Internet environment, cloud storage service providers are very large funds each year, and we have not seen the profit model of cloud storage, how many service providers can continue to provide this service permanently, this service later whether charge? Will it be forced to stop operating because of loss and surplus, and where are the data from the user being migrated? Who is responsible for data security, the service provider in a certain time will be shut down services is the user data retention problem the biggest hidden trouble.

How to detect the security of your cloud service provider

So, for those of you who are really interested in cloud storage and who are willing to migrate, how do you characterize your service security when you choose cloud storage and how to detect your cloud service provider? Here are some suggestions:

Data backup and encryption is the iron threshold of cloud storage, CDN content distribution system, data encryption technology to ensure that the data in the cloud storage will not be accessed by unauthorized users, at the same time, through a variety of data backup and disaster-tolerant technology to ensure that the data in the cloud storage is not lost, to ensure the security and stability of the cloud storage. If the data security in the cloud storage is not guaranteed, and no one dares to use cloud storage, otherwise, the saved data is not quickly lost, is the whole country know.

Cloud storage integrity monitoring methodologies and standards, integrity monitoring is essential in cloud storage services, and data integrity is also the core task of all data centers. Data corruption can occur at any level of storage and any type of media. Bit decay (weakened or lost data on storage media), controller failure, data deduplication corruption, tape failure is a major factor in the damage to different types of media data, and metadata corruption is a direct result of the failure.

In fact, data corruption can occur in any part of the store that is bad. Migrating data to different platforms can easily be corrupted, migrating data to the cloud. The cloud storage System is also a data center of hardware and software that is vulnerable to attacks that can result in data corruption.

such as the well-known Amazon cloud downtime event, many enterprises are not only affected by the long downtime, in fact, their 0.07% of customer data has been lost. It is reported that the cause of data loss is "Amazon ESB volume ... Inconsistent data snapshot recovery. "This means that the data in the Amazon system has been corrupted, so customer data has been lost."

Whenever data loss, especially important data loss, people tend to blame each other to shirk responsibility. In the IT industry, this usually leads to staff being dismissed, the company suffering huge economic losses, and even the worst case of corporate bankruptcy. Therefore, the key is to understand the legal liability of cloud service providers, and each service level agreement (SLA) has taken all possible measures to ensure data security and prevent data loss.

In many legal documents, SLAs tend to be in the interests of the provider rather than the client. Many cloud service providers provide different levels of data protection, but all storage vendors are not liable for data integrity. Including cloud provider protection, it is clear that data loss or corruption is the most common scenario.

For example, Amazon's customer Web services Agreement, which stipulates, "We ... does not provide any form of declaration or warranty, the services provided or third-party content is uninterrupted, error-free, faulty parts, or any content ... will be safe, not lost, or undamaged. "This agreement even suggests that customers" frequently file "their data. As mentioned earlier, the integrity of data management, whether in a data center, a private cloud, a hybrid cloud, or a public cloud, is always the responsibility of the actual owning company of that data.