What You Must Know About Cloud Security

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Almost all companies are now interested in cloud solutions. If your business has any IT processes, including electronic documents, databases, accounting, you will need virtual servers. In recent years, representatives of various spheres and businesses of all sizes have begun to actively use “cloud” solutions. Who is responsible for ensuring that the law’s requirements and standards are met? Is it enough to link your cloud infrastructure and stop worrying about data security? What are the best practices for implementing information security and data protection in cloud storage?

How to Choose the Right Cloud Solution

When choosing any cloud infrastructure, the first thing to do is to understand what business problems need to be solved. The cost and time it takes to move to the cloud depend on the business challenges and the amount of infrastructure required to move the information.

In general, there are three types of cloud solutions: public, private, and hybrid. All of them are built based on servers, programmatically combined into one cluster.

Companies are better suited to adopting the clouds to rapidly expand performance and meet rising demands when demand for data processing exceeds the capacity of on-premises centers. They will also be able to avoid acquiring, deploying and maintaining new servers that will only be utilized occasionally.

The computing resources of the public version of the cloud storage are programmatically divided between customers, which, accordingly, affects the capacity that each customer can receive.

A private cloud provides resources exclusively for one customer. It is isolated at both the physical and software levels. This option is best suited for large corporations.

Hybrid cloud is the ideal solution for sectors with sensitive data, such as banking, government, and healthcare. For example, you may wish to keep certain types of data on-premises while storing less sensitive data on the cloud.

With this hybrid cloud architecture, organizations benefit from the added flexibility of public storage to handle less-regulated computing tasks while meeting all industry requirements.

What is Needed and How Much Does It Cost to Move to the Cloud

Before choosing a provider and actually transferring data to cloud storage, you need to carefully consider the real value of the available information for the business and make a decision: what needs to be saved and what needs to be “virtualized”.

The process of evaluating data before migrating to the cloud is a practice that any company should follow in a standard manner, regardless of the volume of this data. It is an important process that helps organizations keep their data management practices up-to-date and enhances security. It will also help to identify unnecessary arrays of information that are often saved but are useless. To maximize the security or test your technology, use cloud-based testing services by DataArt.

The cloud service provides the entire infrastructure as a service: it allows you to save on investments in your own server infrastructure and its administrators, ensures the stability of work, helps to increase capacity and functions as needed. Plus, all of this is done for a predictable monthly payment, which significantly reduces overall costs.

Depending on the parameters of the data, the tasks, and needs, three types of services of cloud providers are distinguished:

IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service – infrastructure as a service, for example, virtual servers and virtual network; you can install any software and applications;
PaaS – Platform as a Service – platform as a service, for example, a web server or database; you manage the programs, and the provider is responsible for the operating system;
SaaS – Software as a Service – software as a service, for example, email or other office application; you are using the application, and the settings are made by the provider.

Who is Responsible for Data Security

It is the customers who are responsible for compliance with legal or standard requirements. To do this, you need to conclude a special agreement with a certified cloud provider.

At the same time, the customer must create detailed terms of reference, which will indicate the list of desired cloud services. In particular, what standards and requirements must be ensured for information security. You also need to detail the degree of involvement of the cloud provider to ensure security, the need to protect communication channels with systems or users outside the cloud infrastructure.

The move to cloud solutions is a key step in the digital development of companies. Keep in mind, however, that migrating data to the cloud does not remove the responsibility of regularly finding and applying best practices for data management. The use of cloud technologies of any of the models does not eliminate the need to evaluate and make decisions to minimize the risks inherent in the classical IT infrastructure.