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A Look at Security in the Cloud

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Art
Art
Web Hosting Geek

With the recent outage of the Amazon EC2 network and the data breach of the Sony PlayStation Network, many experts and customers are wondering if security is a larger issue in cloud computing than any other type of hosting. The answer is no, cloud services are not riskier than typical applications found in a corporate data center.

The Two Recent Problems

Amazon EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud services were affected on April 21st, 2011 by an outage that shut resulted in major websites being unavailable for three days. To this day, the cause of the outage is not known. Two days prior, Sony shut down two of its cloud servers due to an external intrusion in which the hacker or hackers obtained the personal information of over 77 million subscribers.

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These two problems are proving to be significant. However, they are unusual in the cloud computing world. The outage of Amazon’s servers moved the focus to reliability and availability issues. However, these concerns also existed in the traditional web hosting environments of old. Therefore, it appears as if naysayers to the new cloud technology are simply trying to blame old problems on web hosting progress.

Historical Outages

These outages, whatever the cause, used to occur on a regular basis. Most individuals were unaware due to it affect one or even a handful of organizations, completely on a small scale. These more frequent outages equated to much more lost time, money and business.

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A Lack of Preparation

The biggest result of the Amazon EC2 outage were the weaknesses shown by Amazon not have redundant backup servers in another location or the lack of a failover system utilizing another cloud computing supplier. This major mistake could result in large businesses dropping Amazon for a more reliable carrier.

New Users to Cloud Computing

For many organizations that recently made the move to cloud computing, these types of outages so close in occurrence could be nerve-wreaking. The technology is new and not all the kinks have been ironed out, therefore they are worried about massive data loss and security exploits. Luckily most security applications in the cloud include, spam filtering, hosted email, malware scanning and firewalls. Therefore, if any of these applications went down, it would not be the end of the business.

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Cloud computing has proven to be the most reliable and best-performing type of web hosting available. Despite these security breaches and outages, cloud hosting will continue to improve and be utilized by most organizations.

 

Comments

2 Comments

  • Avatar Amelia@ Ethical Hacking says:

    “…cloud services are not riskier than typical applications found in a corporate data center.”

    I hope so. Many businesses nowadays (SMEs and even large corporations) are now slowly migrating to the cloud. In fact, several IT experts and business insiders stated that in 2014, more than 20% of all IT companies around the world will be on the cloud. Although this is a huge percentage, many enterprises are still hesitant to fully migrate to the cloud because of security and compatibility issues.

    Once these are clarified, many businesses will follow soon. Who knows, three years from now more than 50% of all private and public organizations will be on the cloud.

  • Avatar dedicated servers london says:

    not to jump in and kick them while they’re down I find it interesting that Amazon didn’t have the sort of standard backup that most people do

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