Data Security After the Rise of Hardware as a Service and Infrastructure as a service

The last decade has seen rapid adoption of cloud giving businesses an ability to reduce capital costs and gain access to an infrastructure that is robust and scalable. But this scenario has brought its own set of challenges in areas like security.

A Ground-Breaking Idea

Hardware as a Service ‘HaaS’ and Infrastructure as a service ‘IaaS’ affords businesses an option to access the latest technology, without investing a huge amount of capital to purchase computers or servers.

These services reduce the cost of infrastructure, help corporations become agile and accelerate time to market. Corporations across the globe are leveraging the advantages of this.

Data analytics in the cloud

Today, nearly every business of the world relies on one or more of these services to fast-track their analytics infrastructure and optimize their operations.

By migrating big data analytics to the cloud, businesses can analyze the large amounts of structured and unstructured data that they have on the fly leveraging solutions like AWS Spark and AWS Redshift. The flexibility of these solutions makes them an ideal solution for corporations looking to undertake big data analytics without spending big bucks. With the multiple integration points and an open architecture, PAAS makes data integration from multiple sources a breeze.

The challenge, however, occurs in maintaining ‘data security’ once the user contract ends and the service assets are returned to the service provider, allowing them to initiate a new sales opportunity of the said services.

A Loop in the Net

‘HaaS’ and ‘IaaS’ services allow the user to obtain access to servers, storage, and hardware through the Cloud. The Cloud constantly processes tonnes of data including personally identifiable information (PII). This data essentially held on the Could, however, is still internally collected in the servers and is open to required access anytime. The influx and storage of valuable data, in one place, makes the Cloud providers a prime target for malicious activity.

Data Insecurity on the Rise

Recent studies point to more than 50 billion dollars of damages ensuing from data breaches in the past five years. The Equifax data breach of 2017, which placed more than 143 million individuals’ personal and financial data at risk and cost businesses countless millions to come back to compliance, is an alarming instance for the industry.

Some contemporary data security issues brought to attention by the experts at the Cloud Security Alliance are -

• Data breaches on account of weak identification and access management
• Insecure application programming allowing serious account hijacking and malicious insider issues
• Potential data loss due to shared technology
• Insufficient due diligence
• Nefarious use and abuse of Cloud Services

Against looming data threats, the constant introduction of newer and complex features by Microsoft, Google and Amazon make it increasingly difficult to tackle new-age hackers while staying on top of the latest trends.

Public cloud has no match when it comes to two critical security areas: Privacy and Information security.

Nearly all the leading IAAS providers are it Azure or AWS offer Identity and Access Management (IAM) to ensure privacy. By integrating with services like Active Directory and deploying single sign-on infrastructure corporations get the capability granularly controls usage rights. Cloud helps corporations secure their infrastructure by deploying web-based tokens, multi-factor authentication, and other tools.

Steps to Ensure Security

• Protect the Data: Encryption both in transit and at rest should be ensured
• Adopt Credentialing: Creating exclusive keys and rotating them on a periodical interval of 90 days
• Layer Security: Leveraging multifactor verification fundamentally for privileged and root accounts
• Enhance Visibility: Employing active monitoring tools to keep checks on everything on your IaaS environment and identify any unauthorized access attempts on the interface
• Strengthen Access Management and User Provisioning: Implementing efficient identity and access management and minimize risk by granting users as limited permissions as possible
• Cloud Incident Response Plan: To mitigate the impact of dubious activity and minimize damage
• Disaster Management: Ascertain a viable and practical disaster recovery plan that can guarantee a speedy and fair recovery
• Reasonable Exit Strategy: Clear-cut service terms and simple exit needs to be afforded to the user, to facilitate clutter-free consumer experience

Businesses opting at these services do so with a view to control operating expenses and bearing a data breach can have catastrophic impacts on the reputation of the enterprise, putting at stake the confidence of its consumers and shareholders. The rise of ‘HaaS’ and ‘Iaas’ has certainly generated a host of opportunities for the business world but has also greatly enhanced the responsibility for the service providers to secure sensitive company and customer data.