How To Evaluate The Risks

There are many excuses why hackers do what they do, the main ones being for the purposes of money, activism, or just for a laugh. Some hackers will use ransomware to squeeze the company, or the customer. Some will do it to make a point or bring to light some business practices they don’t agree with. Others simply want to demonstrate that they can do it.

“The cloud” refers to a process where users utilize someone else's computer to do things like store images or documents (cloud storage), or leverage hardware like CPU and memory (cloud computing). In most cases "cloud" solutions are accessed via the internet. In a practical sense, platforms like Dropbox and Google Drive are cloud storage options. These are the ones you are likely to see every day, as most users have some form of cloud storage simply to empty space in their laptops and PCs. And that’s the major selling point: it doesn’t take up memory in your physical computer. You access and get back what you need via the internet.

These are the good news: the benefits

They make more efficient use of the hardware that is hosting them. One server becomes multiple, one data center becomes multiple, and lots of customers can be served at once. Another benefit of the cloud is that you will never entirely lose access to your data. The cloud should never go down. Even if individual servers go down, cloud servers should always stay online and should always stay available to access. And the data behind them should be backed up into multiple servers so that you never lose your data.

The cloud also makes it a lot easier to meet government compliance regulations concerning cyber security. This is because access to the cloud is encrypted, which means hackers or anyone unauthorized to view the data cannot access the cloud by riding on your network connection.

The other side of the fence: the risks

Cloud data breaches do happen. However, misconfiguration is a leading cause of them, mainly due to businesses inadequate cyber security strategies. This is due to several factors. The fundamental nature of the cloud is designed to be easy for anyone to access, and therefore businesses unable to completely see or control the cloud’s infrastructure rely on the cyber security controls that are provided by the cloud service provider (or CSP).

Unauthorized access is also a risk. Due to the internet, which is a readily available public resource to most of the world, that makes it easy for hackers to access the data if they have the credentials to get past the cyber security set up by the individual business.

One method hackers use to get your credentials is called "phishing". The most common phishing strategy is to pose as a legitimate business -like MIcrosoft for example- and send emails asking users to click a button and enter their username and password. Phishing is a very common means of gaining information that would allow access to a customer or business data. Limiting their access is of the utmost priority to every business, but whether the cloud is the way to go about that is up for debate. The cloud offers many cyber security benefits over typical physical data storage and individual servers, but it isn’t bulletproof.

In this digital age, the risk to online security continues. These are unprecedented times in the world of cybersecurity, with ransomware attacks up 150% in 2020, and growing even faster in 2021 and 2022. Your organization will have a much better understanding of your current security vulnerabilities with our systematic approach that will allow you to analyze vulnerability information in a much more effective fashion. You can trust Uzado, because you know your business, and we know cybersecurity. We keep systems secure and compliant so you can focus on growing your business.

Source: itsecurityguru.org