Cloud Computing Security
explanatory Essay
1601 words
Cloud computing facilitates sharing of computing and storage resources with the aim of reducing computing expenses in organizations. Moreover, cloud computing facilitates information sharing among individuals within a cloud. Despite being advantageous, data stored in a cloud is usually prone to hacking and other security issues. This paper addresses the various mitigation measures that organizations are using to ensure that data stored in the cloud is secure.
Despite the numerous advantages offered by cloud computing, security is a big issue concerned with cloud computing. There are various security issues and concerns associated with cloud computing, among them being phishing, data loss and data privacy. There are different mitigation measures that cloud pioneers are currently using to ensure data stored in the cloud remain secure and confidential as intended. Encryption is one mitigation method used to ensure security in cloud computing. According to Krutz and Vines (2010), encryption involves coding of the data stored in the computing cloud such that hackers cannot gain access to the data. Data encryption seems to be the most effective method of ensuring security in computing (Krutz and Vines, 2010). However, it is of paramount importance to note that encrypted data is usually difficult to search or perform various calculations on it.
Google uses data encryption as a method of ensuring that data stored in its cloud is secured and confidential (Bradley, 2010). GovCloud is a special cloud established by Google for storing government related information and data (Bradley, 2010). Due to the sensitivity of the information stored in GovCloud, Google encrypts the data in such a way that the data is not availab...
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Infosecurity, (2010). Google Assures Customers on Cloud Security Practices. Retrieved from:
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Krutz, R and Vines, D, (2010). Cloud Security: a Comprehensive Guide to secure Cloud
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In this essay, the author
- Explains that cloud computing facilitates sharing of computing and storage resources with the aim of reducing computing expenses in organizations. however, data stored in a cloud is usually prone to hacking and other security issues.
- Explains that encryption is one of the mitigation measures used to ensure security in cloud computing. however, encrypted data is difficult to search or perform calculations on.
- Explains that google uses data encryption as a method of ensuring that data stored in its cloud is secured and confidential.
- Explains that amazon employs the principle of data encryption to ensure data security in its cloud.
- Explains that physical security at data storage centers is important to ensure that data stored in the cloud is secure and available even in cases of a data center breakdown.
- Explains that phishing is one of the security issues commonly affecting cloud computing. google has been able to cope with the problem through using fishing detection tools.
- Explains that google maintains a blacklist of phishing urls to curb attacks in its cloud, especially the firefox search engine.
- Explains that cloud providers must establish and maintain good risk management procedures and practices. microsoft identifies and reports various vulnerabilities to clients to ensure security for the clients.
- Explains that microsoft has established remedies for dealing with fraudulent e-mails used for phishing activities. microsoft outlook is equipped with same definition files as those found in vista and windows 7.
- Explains that microsoft ensures that phishing detection tools are always updated and availed to its clients.
- Explains that apple's cloud is the most secure because of its vertical nature and closed space. apple advises its clients on appropriate measures against data loss and unintended retrieval.
- Explains that cloud computing, despite its great achievements, has been limited by security concerns associated with the data stored in the cloud.
- Explains that cloud computing pioneers are using various mitigation measures against cloud security issues, such as data encryption, phishing detection tools, and security maintenance in storage centers.
- Cites bradley, t, provos, n, chew, m, & rubin, d. google apps project delays highlight cloud security concerns.
- Cites acm.ibtimes, measurement of phishing attacks and google assures customers on cloud security practices
- Cites krutz, r, and vines, d. cloud security: a comprehensive guide to secure cloudcomputing.
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In this essay, the author
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- Explains that the abuse and nefarious use of cloud computing is a threat to any organization.
- Explains that cloud service providers are responsible for ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data belonging to their customers. providers with lapse practices and controls create an opening for attackers.
- Explains that phishing and person-in-the-middle attacks can result in an attacker gaining access to a cloud service account.
- Explains that cloud technologies revolve heavily around virtual machines that reside on physical servers. attackers can use exploits in hypervisors to perpetrate these attacks on the physical system.
- Explains the importance of software interfaces and apis in the security and availability of data outsourced to cloud service providers.
- Explains that cloud computing data is spread across countries, continents, or regions. laws governing computer data vary from country to country, while some countries possess strong laws regarding data protection.
- Explains that the president's administration is planning to finalize a security standard that can apply to all cloud services. fedramp calls for joint authorizations and continuous security monitoring services for government and commercial cloud systems for multiagency use.
- Explains that fedramp is not alone in the effort to create standards regarding cloud computing. the national institute of standards & technology (nist) has published two draft publications specifically related to clouds.
- Describes cloud computing as enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services).
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In this essay, the author
- Explains that managing the security of an electronic medical record (emr) system in a cloud computing environment can be challenging.
- Explains that an emr system's primary focus should be to protect patient data from compromise, and hipaa compliance in mind.
- Cites the proceedings of the 2010 icse workshop on software engineering in health care (sehc '10).
- Presents the proceedings of the 2010 acm workshop on cloud computing security workshop (ccsw '10).
- Cites the special issue of ijcct, vol.2, issue 5, 57-62, which focuses on securing data in the cloud.
- Cites proceedings of the 3rd workshop on software engineering in health care (sehc '11), acm, new york, ny, usa.
- Explains that the concept of cloud computing is still a relatively new phenomenon, so it is important to realize the potential issues associated with it.
- Opines that an organization must be diligent about maximizing its security to the fullest extent possible.
- Explains that required certification can leave common vulnerabilities undetected, in proceedings of the second annual workshop on security and privacy in medical and home-care systems.
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- Explains how man in the middle attacks a cloud server and client to insert false information and access information about important data being transferred between them.
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- Explains that denial of service attacks (dos) aim to make sure that targets computer resources become unavailable. the attacker floods the victim with a large number of packets to consume the entire bandwidth and resources of the target computer.
- Explains that sensitive data stored in cloud computing environment is a major issue with regard to security in the cloud based system.
- Explains that data loss is a common problem in cloud computing. data can be lost or damaged due to miss happening, natural disaster, and fire.
- Explains that data confidentiality means that only authorized and intended users are given permission to access the data. cloud computing system offers applications and infrastructures which operate on public networks.
- Explains that exporting data means losing significant control over data. large organizations don’t want to run a software delivered in the cloud that risks their data through interaction with other software.
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- Explains that the cloud service provider must take measures to ensure that customer information is isolated from other customers and users.
- Explains the use of malicious applications to spread spam and malware. intruders can access a public cloud and upload malware to computers in the cloud.
- Explains that an api is used as an interface to interact with cloud services. they must have extremely secure authorization, access control, encryption and logging mechanism.
- Opines that the malicious insider is an important threat as many providers don't disclose how they recruit people, grant them access to sensitive data, or control them. transparency is vital to create a secure cloud.
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In this essay, the author
- Opines that computer science majors should be aware of cloud security issues and be able to use cloud services efficiently.
- Explains that users should be aware of possible data loss, high hijack rates, and less control over the total process.
- Explains the basic structure of the cloud system, which includes infrastructure, platform, and software as a service.
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In this essay, the author
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- Explains that cloud computing will allow better development of software to relieve setbacks. the technology eliminates tedious tasks of maintenance and upgrading servers.
- Opines that cloud computing will gain the organization’s competitive advantage over the competition. with cuts in cost and efficiency, companies will triple their profit growth.
- Opines that saving money and profit is critical to an organization's success. providing convenience of information and relieving setbacks will improve the organization and improve every fellow employee in many ways.
- Explains how cloud computing reduces costs for an organization by eliminating the need for many servers and lowering the electrical power and people costs.
- Explains that cloud computing increases convenience by accommodating to each individual by adapting to their workflow. the flexibility of this feature will allow work to be completed at anytime, anywhere.
- Explains how increasing the functionality of disaster recovery is one of the major ways to improve an organization’s recovery from setbacks.
- Cites columbus, louis, and dix, john. "cloud computing causing rethinking of disaster recovery."
- Explains that cloud computing rains cost savings, productivity benefits. webroot inc., 6 june 2013. ross, asher, tsai, and mike azzi.
1180 wordsRead More - Regulation on Cloud to Protect User Privacyopinion essayRegulation on Cloud to Protect User Privacy This essay discusses regulation that rules cloud provider to protect privacy of data citizens within country. This essay will describe about what cloud services and its wide range of service In the second section, it will explain more about the security threat of cloud services and going more specific into privacy issue. The next section, I will discuss about the extent of technical regulation that porposed from case given by taking model from exist country regulation. In the Fourth section, this essay will discuss about evaluation and another policy as alternative of the previous policy.
In this essay, the author
- Analyzes how the essay discusses regulation that rules cloud provider to protect privacy of data citizens within country.
- Explains that cloud services are widely used by people around the world in purpose of business, government, and personal use. cloud service offers a large-scale service where users only pay for what they use (on-demand).
- Explains that cloud services provide flexible, elastic, and dynamic platform. cloud services gain money from advertising or user list sales.
- Opines that maintaining security in the cloud is like safeguarding the jungle because every weakness in network link are adversary’s opportunity to harm our properties.
- Explains that the term "cloud" gives us potrait like we deal with something behind the cloud that we don't know.
- Opines that the threat should be handled by a cloud company to avoid data leaks from using cloud services.
- Explains that security issues come from poor authorization, limited monitoring, clear-text authentication, and account or services hijacking. amazon ec2 was hijacked by zeus botnet.
- Opines that regulation that urges cloud company to store local citizens' data within country could be guarantee users’ data, but this may result refusing from giant company providers.
- Explains that privacy is about the right of individual to control their environment regarding to three aspects — confidentiality, control, and freedom to participate. cloud users share resources between vendor, cloud provider and other costumers.
- Explains that cloud computing has many threats from wide ranges of adversary capability to violate its users privacy. location affects vulnerability of users' privacy because regulation applies to their data.
- Explains that location of data storage is really matter for users privacy regarding of the local regulation that applied to data. storing data within country could be applied depending on the country itself.
- Argues that localized data in local country with sufficient regulation might be the best solution for protecting users' citizents.
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- Opines that providing better government services around the clock throughout the year means that some services may be available to citizens or companies even during the holidays.
- Explains that the yemeni government is actively seeking to activate the principles of e-government. many scientific conferences have been hosted, but obstacles have slowed the electronic transformation in many government departments.
- Explains the weakness of the telecommunications infrastructure that will enable the service provider (in this case, the government service) to be connected with the user (citizen, government department or civil society).
- Explains the difficulty of persuading the performance of work electronically in government departments because of the old habits favored by decision-makers.
- Opines that it consultants should act as information providers and supervisors of all steps of work, and their views are very important.
- Explains that several challenges have been developed in various aspects of data and information processing for cloud computing as emerging technology.
- Explains that the transition to cloud computing technology requires a major change in the business culture of an organization or establishment.
- Explains that technical support, emergency problem solving, additions and changes to improve the situation is one of the challenges to the success of cloud computing.
- Opines that cloud computing does not have a rapid return on investment unless there is good planning and implementation.
- Argues that reliance on cloud computing requires a deeper, more extensive, and wider dependence on the provider. a deeper and closer partnership and alliance are required.
- Opines that it is imperative for all to cooperate and participate in the successful implementation of the e-government project.
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929 wordsRead More - Difference Between Encryption And Symmetric Encryptionexplanatory essayIn the world, where security breaches and information stealing occurs more frequently, a service offering a secure data storage is a significant factor of a security arrangement. Encryption is simply stated as the practice of systematic information scrambling, so that it can be unscrambled later [10]. Data encryption interprets data into a different form, or cryptograph, so that a person holding a secret key (i.e. a decryption key) or password can access that data. The encrypted data is known as cipher text, whereas the unencrypted data is termed as plaintext. Presently, encryption is considered as one of the most effective data security technique and is widely used by a number of organizations for the purpose of secure and reliable transmission of data containing secret information. Asymmetric encryption and Symmetric encryption are two main types of encryption techniques.
In this essay, the author
- Explains that encryption algorithms are used to ensure the encryption of the data that is transmitted while the communication process.
- Explains that the key size used for an aes cipher specifies the number of repetitions of transformation rounds that convert the input, called the plaintext, into the final output.
- Explains that the first transformation in the aes encryption cipher is substitution of data using a substitution table; the second transformation shifts data rows, the third mixes columns; and the last transformation is an exclusive or (xor) operation performed on each column.
- Explains that the decryption process of an aes cipher-text is quite the same as the encryption process in the reverse order.
- Explains that since sub-processes in each round are in reverse manner, encryption and decryption algorithms need to be separately implemented, although they are closely related.
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- Explains that the complexity finder is a powerful algorithm that provides estimations of data complexity and helps to find out the selection of encryption algorithm to secure the data during the transmission.
- Describes the advanced encryption standard (aes), a subset of the rijndael cipher designed by two belgian cryptographers.
- Explains that the 16 input bytes are substituted by looking up a fixed table (s-box) given in design. the matrix of four rows and four columns is shifted to the left.
- Explains how the matrix is transformed into a new matrix consisting of the same 16 bytes but shifted with respect to each other.
1277 wordsRead More - Cloud Computing Essayexplanatory essayThe dark side of Cloud Computing The inception of Cloud Computing could be traced back to 1950s when large scale mainframe computers were being utilised for only communication purposes with no processing capacities. Within a short span of time, the proliferation of technology has taken Cloud Computing into a new era where no one has ever thought or imagined before. It seems to be limitless, some even says addictive. It is like taking steroid to enhance your personnel well-being, corporate performance, productivity and growth depending on which perspective that you are coming from.
In this essay, the author
- Explains the dark side of cloud computing. it's a new era where no one has ever thought or imagined before.
- Explains that tech giants like google, microsoft, amazon, apple, samsung and ibm have invested billions of resources to provide their client it services that are hosted on the internet. this paradigm shift has raised concerns in the loss of control over data as well as privacy and security.
- Describes the risks associated with cloud computing, such as loss of control over data and dependency on service providers.
- Opines that most clients are aware of losing control of their data when storing them with an outside computing service provider. these data could be compromised by the service provider as there is a lack of transparency.
- Explains that service providers are capable of performing data mining techniques to analyse their client data. this is a sensitive function and could put clients in risk when it fall into wrong hands.
- Explains that mobile devices allow clients to access, process, transfer, and store data on the move. users can access their data remotely and their connection may not be adequately protected.
- Explains that traditional risk management and compliance issues are split between the service provider and the client. data recovery could be a problem if the legislative compliance is not properly defined.
- Opines that it is critical to enforce this mandatory of deletion of data act in regulations in cloud computing services.
- Explains that cloud computing is highly dependable on a reliable network that ensures and guarantees the operations of the client of services provided in the cloud by service provider.
- Explains that cloud service providers depend on availability, which could affect business continuity. some services lack a contract between the client and the service provider.
- Explains that cloud computing is a form of green computing, but there is no way to measure it. users are staying connected longer than before, which has led to an explosion of urge in the energy usage that could lock in polluting energy sources.
- Opines that there is also a risk of monopoly and privatisation of the cyberspace.
- Opines that the future of cloud computing is unpredictable as it is still evolving. if those concerns mentioned earlier are not managed early, it may manifest to something that may adversely impact mankind.
- Opines that as responsible services providers and users, an independent body has to be formed to look at the penitent issues and sieve out the potential risks.
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