Cloud security challenges arising from cloud computing

Over the past few years, the rise of cloud computing has been a hot topic in the field of technology. And with the global economy in recession, the demand for corporate control costs is growing, whether the business process through the "cloud" outsourcing has become a topic of concern to managers. In this trend, "cloud computing is growing, both as a real-time networking tool and as a measure to cope with the recession," Strategy Analytics's latest report said. According to Accenture's forecast, 2013, China's cloud computing market will reach 117.4 billion yuan, is in rapid expansion.

As we all know, "cloud" in the literal sense, means that the cloud generally broad, comfortable storage space, can achieve computing power, service and application sharing. For enterprises, outsourcing means that a company can achieve "optimization" of its business process at a much lower cost than its own management-if it can outsource the management of e-mail, what is the reason for the company to have a number of buzzing e-mail servers in its limited offices and a team of technical maintenance teams?

In the view of Paul Dean, managing director of Information Technology services at Essen Greater China, SMEs are the most suitable user groups for cloud computing Services (Dingbaolo). With this service, small and medium-sized enterprises do not have to set up their own systems, but can buy off-the-shelf key business process services from the market. "In this way, corporate procurement, finance and CRM can be incorporated into the cloud computing system, rather than showing how much hardware the company buys in the balance sheet." "This is particularly important in times of economic depression.

Is outsourcing really a good idea even if it lowers costs? While cloud computing services are booming, giants such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon and IBM all know that it is not unimpeded. After all, there are many factors that need to be considered to decide whether to outsource a business process.

First, the implementation of cloud computing is the integration of existing systems and cross-platform applications, "It is a challenge if the existing system can combine the application of the cloud to operate properly." "Dingbaolo points out. The migration costs, implementation cycles, and technology maturity of migrating existing systems to cloud computing are problems that must be addressed. Many CIOs are also concerned that cloud computing, which spends a lot of budget and effort on deployment, is short-lived and will soon be replaced by other new technologies.

On this basis, the company must also forecast and manage the internal data processing capabilities, thus deciding how much to invest in infrastructure. While the "cloud" is the most effective way to deal with large data, if you deploy all of the processing power within your company, the business trough can lead to excess processing power that costs the company dearly. In addition, if the company outsourcing more business processes, and the use of different suppliers, then maintain the consistency of the system will become a challenge.

By contrast, the issue of "cloud security" remains more critical. An IT vendor may be able to provide you with a very suitable cloud application, and companies and organizations can benefit from cloud processing capabilities, but are you willing to deliver the most precious resources-customer data to external suppliers? Does the company's data mix with other companies ' data? In addition, if the IT vendor is closed, How will the company's data be affected?

In other words, the service provider is honest and reliable, directly related to the customer's confidential information will be lost or leaked. However, the information between cloud computing service providers and users is not symmetrical, on the one hand, it is out of the original intention of liberating and optimizing its IT resources, enterprises outsource it computing and service to cloud service providers, so they hardly have enough resources to gain insight into the "cloud" details of IT service providers. On the other hand, IT service providers are unable to fully present the key information in the cloud to the users for their own commercial confidentiality. So in many cases, companies using cloud computing must retain control over their data for security reasons.

"From the traditional it domain into the field of cloud computing, is tantamount to entering a new world, which involves a variety of data and multiple suppliers." How the data in the cloud is protected is naturally a problem. "It's not just a technical issue, it's about policy, system, regulation, trust, and so on," Dingbaolo said. "While people are increasingly familiar with cloud computing and are more willing to carry out their business through cloud services, there is still a lot of ambiguity about cloud security," he said. As far as the Chinese market is concerned, although the government has invested a lot of money and policy support in cloud computing, there are no relevant laws and regulations on cloud computing operations yet. For the enterprise, once the data is out of the question, and the ultimate responsibility can not be investigated, it will cause unimaginable losses.

"That's why we recommend that companies set up the chief Security architect position in a cloud computing environment." "Dingbaolo said. Past crises have often been remedied by hindsight, and are now turning to proactive management. The chief Security Architect should fully co-ordinate all aspects of "cloud security", "not only to track the solution itself, but to comprehensively assess risk from the perspective of trust, regulation, policy, etc." "Only in this way will the company be passive in its response to possible large-scale it accidents in the future."