Will The Cloud Become More Vulnerable in 2017?

Jul 26,2021 by Manoj Yadav

The cloud is working like a double-edged sword today; while it has made the world smaller and given access to information to users spread far and wide, it has exposed data to greater threats and more vulnerability. With the numbers of users and technologies increasing day by day, the cloud is witnessing an evolution and you can expect many more changes to occur in this year. Reports indicate that the traffic in hyperscale data centers will increase five times by 2020 and they will make up nearly 53% of data center traffic. Almost 92% of workloads is going to get processed by the cloud data centers by 2020 and enterprise workloads will make up 72% of these data center workloads. New trends in Big Data will have huge effects on our digital lives and all these developments will bring forth many more risks.

This problem becomes more profound when you try to deploy cutting edge technologies inside outdated and aging brick and mortar architecture. As new technologies make their way into our lives, you will find that attacks on these are far more sophisticated than ever before. These attacks are not only high-end; they are more lethal. So, data attacks have now become the single most worrisome factor affecting data centers which are keen to host the most updated cloud hosting technologies.

Arbor Networks says that the DDoS attacks still remain the most common attacks because of the easy availability of tools to help any individual having web connectivity to launch an attack. But the frequency, nature and complexity of these attacks have undergone radical changes. Incidentally, in the past one and a half years, there has been an average of nearly 124,000 events every week. Countries like UK, France and the US are the most common targets for such attacks. Only in October of last year, the severest DDoS attack was recorded when a botnet created by Mirai software hijacked poorly-secure devices like the CCTV cameras at 17 sites. As many as75% of the global vantage points had sent queries which got no response from Dyn servers and many of the services that were affected even caused collateral damage causing outages.

What is interesting to note here is that these threats against the cloud are not limited to the applications only; there are new kinds of risks which have the power to affect the whole cloud data center. So, when working with the modern day cloud, administrators have to take cognizance of some critical factors. These can help businesses to tackle these new emerging threats and to safeguard themselves against these as far as possible.

Businesses have to be well-equipped to protect data from theft and leakage since huge volumes of data are getting pumped into the cloud each day. So, institutions like financial services and healthcare institutions, government services and educational IT organizations must take every possible step to keep their data confidential and well protected.
There must be logical and physical correlation at data center levels to prevent the attacks; businesses have to seek ways to control application routes even if workloads cannot be directly controlled. The hackers are now trying to exploit the loopholes in the security system of cloud data centers and this is why businesses have to take a far more comprehensive approach when it comes to securing their data centers.
It is important to understand that today’s users are going to adopt non-traditional ways for using digital technologies. This is why you must find proper means to protect your users; so, you have to devise new EPP (end point protection) and EDR (end point detection and response) solutions. There is a growing to need to introduce artificial intelligence in security too.

The cloud is going to experience many changes because organizations now have to be even more careful about security. While you are likely to face quite a few bumps on the way, the journey is going to be worthwhile in the end. To ensure that you have to deal with a less bumpy ride, you can try to stick to a simple lifecycle for your cloud ecosystem. You must make a plan first, execute it and then validate it. Since it is easy to test cloud technologies, you should make it a point to assess your needs and choose the best model for your business requirements. And most importantly, you should be prepared to evolve as cloud technologies will need to be continuously monitored and updated. Businesses will be able to flourish when they can utilize the full potential of cloud technologies. This is why understanding security threats and implementing security provisions for the cloud should be your topmost priority. Your job is to get your hands on the best tools to secure your workload, to make the workloads more transparent and to ensure that the business is growing with the cloud.

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