Businesses irrespective of their strength and size have started adopting the cloud environment due to the numerous benefits it does offer to them. In a recent survey to measure the cloud reach, Microsoft has established that approximately 50% of the total small business will be the part of this Cloud Hosting revolution in next three to four years. Although the functionality of both private and public clouds is almost same, yet you need to be careful as your crucial information and employee data is being open to the third-party service providers. There is no debate on the point if I am saying that cloud gives a better cost-advantage to the businesses but there are still some concerns you need to clarify with your service provider.
Points To Ponder Before Subscribing A Cloud Server
If you have already decided to go with the cloud environment, I am stating below certain points that you may escalate to your service provider before signing the final deal. Lets us take it in an order.
Magnitude Of Data Transfer:
Alike other networks, data traversal in cloud environment does happen using the internet. This may as usual open lid to vulnerability and security threats. That is why you need to confirm from your cloud provider about the security mechanism set in the place to ensure the data safety. Whether or not the service provider running the data using safe and secure data transmission channel. In most of the cases service providers arrange standard industry protocols to safeguard data.
Security Of Software Interface:
There are a number of software interfaces and APIs you use while running a cloud service. All these interfaces are prone to the vulnerabilities in terms of data integrity and reliability. It is always a better idea to check the inclusions of interface security measures in Service Level Agreement documents. You may quiz your service provider about authentication and access control techniques available to secure various APIs used.
Data Security Concerns:
It is very important to give a serious thought to the data security if your information is hosted on provider's server. It is quite true that most of the Data Center Service providers ensure considerable safety terms for the data distributed on the cloud platform. However, since you have invested a good amount of money on subscribing the service, ask potential cloud providers how they ensure the data security on their servers while used and accessed by other third party cloud-based applications. You may also quiz the process of disposal of the same data.
User Access Control:
When you host your cloud services to a provider or a Web Hosting Company, employees of that organization may access the data and you can't control it. That is why I will suggest you to discuss role access and user access control policies with your service provider. Consider the sensitivity and confidentiality of data you allow the access for. Request your hosting service provider to give you details about the people who are authorized to access the data. It will help you to consult the individual particularly in case of breach or threat.
These are probably some prominent security issues that I have escalated here. This doesn't mean that story ends here. In further readings you will get more inputs about cloud environment and its mechanism.
Cloud computing has gained a magnificent success and now almost touched to a point of maturity. Organizations are now strongly relying on cloud servers to create different business models around its capabilities. Experts say that the Cloud models will continue to grow at a rapid pace. They believe that the budget spent on cloud expenditure will be significant in the near future and would be inching closer to a notable percentage of total IT spending.
The stability of a robust cloud computing ecosystem depends upon three core factors that you should take into the consideration.
Cloud Server Monitoring:
This is of utmost important to guard your cloud system. A cloud environment is quite complex as it’s weaved with interconnected systems accessing multi-ple resources spanning a number of data centers. To stay competitive, many organizations constantly monitor their reporting environment and leverage different tools to ensure complete visibility into the entire cloud platform.
The metrics need to be monitored are:
- Network Performance
- Latency Monitoring
- Application Monitoring
- Login and Access Monitoring
- License Usage
- Resource Usage and Utilization
The report that these tools generate are tentative in nature and give you an insight where focus is required. I don’t deny that an organization might have other specific requirements around cloud monitoring. However, these reports and data fetched from monitoring tools can give you actionable, predictive analytics around your cloud.
Cloud Server Replication:
Replication of a cloud system stands important when organizations need to have complete control over resiliency, uptime, and failover. Replication comes as a backup plan when any or few of the critical components of cloud architecture go down. In this scenario, a complete replication plan should be in place to replicate data, applications, users, cloud resources, and potentially more components to minimize the risk. You may choose various high-end replication tools which can help you replicate between on premise and even cloud-to-cloud deployments.
Before replicating the components of cloud architectures, test out your replication methodologies to make sure that they are operating optimally and functioning properly. Cloud computing is evolving with each passing day, therefore keep your data and cloud replication strategies better to minimize downtime.
Cloud Server Security:
This is the most important factor that ensures stability if implemented in a holistic manner. With tightly packed Cloud, security, organizations can secure different workloads, data sets, applications, and more. Security isn’t merely installing a next-generation firewall, but an arrangement of adopting cloud-to-cloud security, compliance-based – secure – replication and storage, and even security analytics.
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While setting up a cloud server security mechanism, you need to have few things clear in mind. A security mechanism is worthy only if you know where data is being stored and who has access to it. You must have access to network paths, whether on-site and remotely. Last, but not the least, you should have your cloud service specifications documented well.