GMO Cloud

August 14, 2012 | Uncategorized

Like all cutting-edge technologies, cloud computing has several security issues peculiar to the medium. Since most of the environment is virtual, security and business continuity challenges are very different from those faced by more traditional IT centers. Today, about 40% of servers are virtualized, rising to nearly 86% by 2018, meaning that challenges of managing the security of virtual devices will only increase. The key areas that will have to be addressed in the future are –

• An exponential growth in data volumes and mobility – The virtual environment encourages mobility of the user, with databases, workloads and workflows all increasingly accessed by mobile users. This virtual environment is regularly backed up on physical drives in the data center. In a number of cases, hourly instances of virtual servers are maintained as snapshots. While this easily gives IT administrators comfort in management, sensitive data gets stored in different locations. This data has to be managed with care and administrators have to ensure that there is no compromise on security. This requires a well-planned, structured workflow to manage backups and data.
• Is the shredder working? – With the large number of copies of data being stored on physical media, there has to be certainty in its being deleted securely. Fortunately, these challenges have been well understood and handled. The following key steps are implemented routinely by all good cloud service providers to ensure client data and processes are secure –
• Data Isolation – This ensures that data and virtual instances of servers handling critical data are isolated from commonly used components of the system.  Thus even if there is a security issue with the cloud hypervisor, the critical data continues to be isolated, never exposed. Essentially, what data isolation implements is a philosophy and not merely a technology. Based on the structure of your application, your data isolation procedures could be different from those used by another company.
• Separation of Responsibility – Companies take steps to ensure that duties, responsibilities and privileges are distributed among administrators so that no single person can abusively impact a system.
• Using established standards – Companies that build robust applications use established standards tested adequately and in extensive corporate use. An example is the use of the PCI-DSS – the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, the like of which ensures regulatory compliance issues are handled adequately.
• Ensuring multi-tenant protection – Good solutions ensure that in shared environments with multiple tenants in the data center, there are strong and effective controls over instances of virtual machines and data. There is also no possibility of one user being able to gain access to data belonging to another. Once these steps are implemented, the entire VM lifecycle is managed securely starting from provisioning, starting up the instance, use, backup and recovery, and deletion.  Besides this, any product chosen must also comply with a number of other requirements to ensure the business stays agile and responsive.
• Your service provider must support a flexible deployment – There could be a number of occasions when you use hybrid clouds or even keep some critical data on your own premises to meet regulatory or security needs. This could happen after your services have already been launched from (say) a public cloud. The solution provider must be able to support this.
• Deployment must be fast – Using predefined, encrypted server images to speed up the process. These can be modified post-deployment to cater for specific needs, ensure you do not lose fleeting opportunities.
• Administration must be very intuitive, menu driven and efficient – Since the churn in IT sector manpower is a well-known phenomenon, you need not invest too much time and resources in training new staff. The solution you choose must provide administrators with efficient dashboards from where the entire set of virtual machines can be managed efficiently.

Many users also give great importance to integration with third party applications. At some time in the future, this need could arise. You would not want to make major changes to your application just to ensure this.

With cloud computing services becoming the backbone of many companies, service providers who offer these fundamental capabilities will help you get the best from your cloud investments. GMO Cloud competitively offers its services at highly efficient levels such as security, flexibility, deployment and administration. Visit the rest of this website to find out more about their services.

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About the Guest Author:

Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.