TECHNOLOGY

Cloud computing security risks

Published

2 years ago

August 18, 2022

As more companies rely on cloud-based technology, particularly because remote working is so widespread, it’s crucial to ensure systems are secure and confidential data remains protected. Using cloud storage is not necessarily dangerous, but there are some security weaknesses that businesses should be aware of and understand how to prevent.

The following are some of the most common cybersecurity pitfalls:

Data breaches

A key cloud security risk is poor security measures, resulting in data breaches. Businesses must ensure their online storage provider guarantees complete protection against leakage or unauthorised access to personal and sensitive data.

Data loss

Not all cloud service providers are equipped to deal with producing backups when needed, meaning data loss is a risk if businesses do not store their files with an organisation that offers reliable backups.

Data leakage

Cloud services often come with publicly-accessible URLs for uploading and downloading files; this may result in data leakage if improper security controls are used. Businesses must mitigate this risk via strong link encryption and restrictive access.

Account hijacking

Cybercriminals can obtain login information to access sensitive data stored in the cloud and are known to exploit vulnerabilities in network infrastructure, so best practice is to use strong passwords that are changed frequently.

Insider threats

Security threats aren’t only external: administrators, developers and other trusted employees with access to sensitive data may cause damage by accident. Training your staff on how to correctly use cloud software is vital.

Insecure API

Cloud services with insecure APIs threaten the confidentiality and integrity of information and risk the exposure of your data and systems. Typically, there are three types of attacks that hackers will use to try to compromise APIs: brute force attacks, denial-of-service attacks and man-in-the-middle attacks.

No control over repositories

You typically have little control over where your data is stored; if a breach occurs, you may not even be aware if it happened or where. To mitigate this risk, it’s advised that admins understand the security measures at each location and encrypt their data before uploading.

Best practices for risk management

Cloud penetration testing

Cloud penetration testing should be conducted regularly as part of your business’s risk management strategy as it’s an effective and proactive way to assess a cloud-based system’s cyber security strength. It probes vulnerabilities within the cloud, as a real-world hacker would, to test the system.

Contingency planning

Ensure that your online storage provider has a business continuity plan that outlines their strategy for protecting information stored within their servers in the case of any serious emergencies, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks. You should also ask how often they test this plan to make sure everything works properly.

Data security audit

Ask your service provider whether they perform routine audits of security controls to protect end users’ personal data and sensitive files stored throughout their networks; if not, then you might want to look for another cloud computing partner who can provide complete transparency regarding the security measures implemented by their system’s administrators.

Security training

You should also ask your cloud storage provider if they offer training to help educate staff about potential cyber threats and security risks involved with cloud services. Employees must understand the inner workings of their company’s data management system, especially when it comes to avoiding social engineering attacks on end users’ personal information and files stored remotely.

Customer service

Be aware that many service providers fail to provide 24/7 support for clients, which can be very frustrating whenever problems occur outside office hours. Ask your online storage provider if they offer 24/7 technical support for their customers, or at least ensure you know the average response time to resolve any service-related issues.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt cloud computing provides businesses with access to their important data virtually, from anywhere, without needing to maintain a server. However, with remote access to sensitive and business-critical data, there is a need for sufficient risk management to prevent hackers from breaching cloud applications.

Understanding the risks and vulnerabilities of cloud services is crucial to safeguarding your business against cyber criminals. Cyber security solutions that include cloud penetration testing services will go a long way to providing greater peace of mind for businesses concerned about their cloud security. Cloud pen testing can identify and manage threat monitoring for most cloud service providers and deliver detailed threat assessments to businesses.

Before signing up for a cloud provider, you should check they offer the security your business needs. The more you research, the easier it’ll be to determine which companies offer the best features and security for your needs, as well as which ones have a proven confidentiality track record.

Defense.com believes cyber security should be a priority for everyone and is helping make world-class cyber protection accessible for all companies.

Tags: cybersecurity, data leak, data loss

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud