Of all the major concerns associated with Cloud Hosting and Cloud Computing, the one most Cloud hosting consumers are concerned about is security. Even though QuoteColo runs the best colocation hosting review site around, clients of all stripes looking to maximize their productivity and lower their IT spend constantly ask us about secure Cloud computing.
Due to this, we are going to take this time to talk about some straight forward Cloud Computing security issues and how you can resolve them.
Data Center Cloud Hosting Security
The first major goal in accomplishing secure Cloud hosting is in understanding the physical and virtual security abilities of your Cloud hosting provider. This means understanding the tier of data center your web hosting operated out of, understanding the data security levels of your provider (redundancy, replication, backups) and understanding the physical security of your chosen Cloud hosting data center (24/7/365 security, flood zone location etc.).
Securing the Cloud
Another level of secure Cloud hosting which most people don’t think about it is securing your LAN (Local Area Network). As you pay your web hosting provider to supply you with secure Cloud server hosting, you still have to secure your LAN. Without following the proper security protocols on your LAN (firewalls, antivirus, avoiding phishing emails, not visiting untrustworthy websites etc.), your LAN will compromise the security of your Cloud.
Data Access
Beyond understanding the physical and virtual security capabilities of your Cloud provider and beyond securing your LAN, one of the most important aspects of secure Cloud hosting is how you access your critical data. For the businesses out there, a private Cloud deployment allows you to store and access critical business behind a privately deployed, firewall blocked Cloud. When employees are outside of the private Cloud firewall blocked deployment, gaining access to critical business solutions can be a bit harder to accomplish with full proof security.
So the question arises, when outside of a private Cloud deployment, how does an employee or consumer access business sensitive data without the possibility of a security leak? The answer is a VPN.
A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a secure tunnel which allows encrypted data access from one point to the next. While we could provide a technical explanation of how a VPN works to defeat Cloud computing security risks (tunneling protocols, encryption techniques etc.), explaining how a VPN works is as simple as imagining a hose cut at two ends. On one end, information enclosed in a barrier is put into one open end of the hose. The open end is then sealed and the information is sent on its way. When the enclosed information reaches its destination, a hole is cut in the hose, the information is extracted, the hose hole is closed and the information is opened by unlocking the enclosed barrier surrounding it.
Essentially, this is how a VPN works. Utilizing a VPN within Cloud hosting means employees and consumers who are not securely behind the private firewall can access data without it seeping out across the Internet. VPN’s provide secure Cloud hosting by securing the ends at which data is accessed and received.
As you can see, ensuring secure Cloud hosting is a mixed bag of different aspects. From data center provider security, to virtual Cloud services data security, to securing your LAN with firewalls to making use of a virtual private network, secure Cloud hosting is determined by a variety of important elements.
For true Cloud computing security, all the elements spelled out above must be taken care of. If even one element is missing, secure Cloud hosting cannot happen.