Data Security in Cloud Computing: Understand its Various Aspects and Protecting Your Data

Quick Summary: Cloud computing is always the hottest topic in the IT world because of the advantages it offers. But let’s face it, with pros comes some cons too. And when talking about the cons, the most crucial one is - data security in cloud computing. Here in this blog, we’ll be discussing the multiple aspects of cloud computing data security. Keep reading!

Data is the currency for contemporary businesses. There was a time when data only existed on paper, and data security was majorly a people-driven action. And to get full-proof data security was a hard nut to crack. But long gone are those days, as digitization has taken over everything. Now majority of businesses are opting for cloud computing. Hard to believe? Well, as per Accenture report, there's been a good hike in cloud computing utilization as more than 86% of organizations are reporting a rise in cloud commitment.

As companies in these fast-tech times gather, store, transfer, process, and utilize more data, they are adopting cloud computing increasingly. Moreover, cloud computing technologies help businesses in better workforce partnerships across different geographic locations as well as between external and internal end users.

Challenging tech environments often utilize an integration of on-premises, multi-cloud, and hybrid cloud, to store a plethora of sensitive data in distinct locations. However, there are certain times when businesses forget where their sensitive data resides and whether it is secure or not. Vicious players are turning their focus to the cloud, looking to steal personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive data. Hence, with a vast amount of data stored in the cloud, knowing, and understanding data security is the cornerstone to avoid any kind of data breaches, compliance risks, bad reputation, or financial mishandling.

Wondering what exactly is cloud computing data security?

Well, congratulations! Here, we’ll discuss the same. And always remember data security and cloud environment are two peas in a pod.

Let’s begin!

What is Data Security in Cloud Computing?

Data security in cloud computing is an important technique to protect all the saved digital information from any theft or malicious attack. Cloud computing data security involves full-proof cloud data protection against malicious actors, disruption of data access due to disasters, fraudulent modifications of data, and unauthorized access to electronic files. Data security on the cloud was one of the top concerns for organizations and business owners, but the rising adoption of the cloud for different purposes like - cloud application development, migration to cloud, cloud modernization, etc., in recent times has made it more challenging.

Simply stated, data protection in the cloud implies any information or data stored on a remote server should be safeguarded. The data resides within the internal network, with diverse levels of access controls and encryption/decryption techniques.

Additionally, according to 90% of firms, one of the most important factors influencing the success of a cloud strategy is cloud security. That's intriguing, right? Let us take you through why data security is essential in cloud computing.

Why is Data Security Essential in Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing data security is important, irrespective of whether it is in private clouds or public clouds. Privacy violations, accidental misconfigurations of data objects and cloud services, illicit data access, multiple reasons for data breaches, attacks during cloud migration, or cloud database security issues, are a few of the multiple cloud computing security issues. Organizations confront these cloud computing security issues when they deploy cloud applications and critical data into the cloud. Other threats or security risks of cloud computing also impact on-site environments, like internal threats or any loopholes, leading to cloud data security programs failures.

Therefore, for businesses to reap the advantages of the cloud, they should know and understand the top cloud computing security issues, or challenges, and cloud security best practices or techniques to resolve them. They should also understand the general cloud data protection considerations and specific cloud data protection techniques for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS cloud services.

Moving on, let’s now talk about one of the most important aspects of data security in cloud computing, i.e., the most shared challenges or security risks of cloud computing.

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What are the Common Challenges of Cloud Data Security?

Some familiar challenges or risks with data protection in cloud environments include:

• Minimized Control – Minimal control of your data is one of the most critical challenges in the world of cloud computing data security. Since apps and data are hosted on third-party infrastructure, it is difficult to control how the data can be accessed and shared.

• Incompatible Coverage - Organizations are now finding hybrid and multi-cloud to be suitable options for their business needs and requirements. However, there are multiple cloud providers in the market offering a wide range of capabilities and coverage that can provide inconsistent protection and a lot of issues while maintaining data privacy in cloud computing.

• Strict Compliance Needs – If you ask any cloud consulting company, they’ll tell you how businesses are under constant stress to adhere to strict data protection and privacy standards. Hence, they require enforcing multiple security protocols throughout multiple cloud environments and indicating rigorous data administration.

• Lack of Visibility - Organizations at certain times don’t understand where all their sensitive data and applications reside and what resources are stored in their inventory. This is one of the biggest challenges with data protection in the cloud.

• Confusion over Shared Duties - Cloud service providers and businesses share the responsibilities of data security in cloud computing, this sometimes leads to unwanted confusion if tasks and responsibilities are not defined, understood, or communicated properly.

• Rising Cybersecurity Risks - Cloud data storage and database management are the soft targets for malicious actors or hackers looking for a huge pay packet (it's certainly like a party for them), mostly where organizations lack good knowledge on data handling and cloud management.

Challenges and challenges, stressful right? But there’s nothing to worry about. No problem in the world comes without a solution. So, in the following section, we’ll see some of the best and well-known techniques for maintaining data security in cloud computing. Also, these techniques are the best for resolving any challenges related to cloud data protection.

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What are the Best Techniques for Data Security in Cloud Computing?

Following are some of the best techniques for maintaining your cloud computing data security with several other benefits:

• Access Control Techniques

So, access control is one of the best techniques for handling data security in a cloud computing scenario. This technique guarantees the right degree of access to the business data and ensures convinient control over its users. At higher levels, the access control technique is a selective limitation to the information accessible to the users.

• Authentication and Identity Techniques

Whether it be cloud applications or other cloud solutions, building the foundation of trust on digital platforms needs a proper identity check to ensure that the user exists and the data they provide is valid (and true). A reliable cloud security service provider plays a critical role in this process—enabling effective user profile validation that, in turn, ensures top-notch security for data.

• Secure Deletion Techniques

I bet few of you may not have any idea about this. It is that many hackers and malicious actors can manage to locate data which has been deleted and try to exploit it. This means deleting the data inadequately on the devices and in the cloud can lead to serious breaches in data security on the cloud. Thus, adopting to secure deletion methods is a must to prevent cyber threats.

• Encryption Techniques

Data encryption for maintaining data security in cloud computing is the process of encoding or converting data before it is transferred to cloud storage. Hence, secure encryption is necessary to safeguard the data that resides in the cloud, particularly for the important data that provides substantial value for longer periods.

Believe me, experts at Radixweb, a trusted cloud application development company, swear by these techniques for maintaining as well as enhancing data security and privacy in cloud computing.

Now, let’s go through some of the cloud security best practices for better and more efficient implementation.

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Best Practices for Implementing Cloud Data Security

To guarantee top-notch data security and privacy in cloud computing, organizations must adhere to the following cloud security best practices that can help address cloud computing security issues.

Some of the important tips and tricks for efficient cloud data protection include:

• Deploy a data loss prevention (DLP) tool as your company’s security strategy to focus on finding and avoiding any kind of cloud computing security issues, any leakages, or misuse of data through security breaches.

• Strengthening your identity and access management (IAM) is also one of the most significant cloud security best practices.

• Deploying advanced encryption techniques for better data security in cloud computing is an efficient approach to safeguard data (want to protect data? encrypt it). This is also one of the significant cloud computing trends.

• Adhere to proper security protocols and governance that enforce cloud computing data security standards, while also following the industry and government rules and regulations.

ConclusionAs more organizations continue their cloud adoption journey, particularly if they rely on the hybrid or multi-cloud, then to be honest, the cloud environment gets a bit challenging. Hence, data security in cloud computing is an important aspect for reducing the company’s cloud computing security issues or risks and efficient cloud data protection, eventually saving the brand's name and reputation.So, to protect businesses against increasingly evolving cloud threats and deploy cloud data security programs, consider opting for solutions that help seamless management of cloud computing data security. Hence, as a leading software development company and a reputable name in providing secure cloud solutions for businesses, Radixweb offers innovative cloud solutions integrated with modern technologies and adheres to every aspect related to data security in cloud computing. Our experts also help businesses manage cloud computing security issues and risks in the current time's extensive and distributed era.Contact our experts to know more about all the viable solutions for efficient data security in cloud computing.