Security Risks of Cloud Computing

By | January 19, 2013

Cloud computing technology enhances IT infrastructure of companies. Cloud computing are adopted by many organizations because cloud providing sophisticated applications which makes more affordable. However, there are certain issues and risks associated with cloud computing.

Cloud computing is fraught with security risks, but has “unique attributes that require risk appraisal in areas such as data integrity, recovery, and privacy, and an assessment of legal issues in areas such as e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and auditing”.

Following are some of the security risks associated with cloud computing:

  • Security because less privacy protection in the Cloud because everything is based on the Internet and there may be a chance of many hack attacks. Many can see your secret information without interaction with you. You had better you send your data on a secure channel for running business applications secure and also ask the service provider about this matter.
  • Compatibility is the another issue with the cloud because company would have to replace much of its existing IT infrastructure to make the system compatible on the cloud. By deploying hybrid cloud model in organization can get of the compatible issues.
  • Majority of a business’s information is stored “off the cloud” that is, it is stored in multiple servers which are all spread across the country. And if any of these servers encounters issues, it ceases the flow of entire information that affects the business operations severely and if this problem occurs in a server that is present in a different country, the issue aggravates further. Companies need to discuss this issue with their providers before beginning of work on cloud computing and also company should clarify whether this service provided by them is guaranteed even during periods of bandwidth interruption and similar other issues.
  • Still there is a lack of standardization in cloud computing technology and is not yet set by the providers.
  • There would be some monitoring issues on the cloud because company gives responsibility of maintaining data to a service provider.
  • The interfaces uses to interact with the cloud service should be reliable, else, there may be a chance of unknown threats to your data.
  • Weaker security systems can be easily broken by anyone, hence be careful in terms of passwords.

The above are some of the issues associated with cloud whenever you transferred your personal data to be hosted through web applications.