Internet security is the major concern in this current IT world. Cyber attacks are growing exponentially and data breaches are increasing at an alarming rate. The process of migration is often caught up by these cyber attacks and excessive care and caution must be taken during the process. When data is being moved from a physical server to a cloud or from one cloud to another, your organization’s data is most vulnerable. Neither your network security nor the cloud’s security can fully protect your data from any breaches during the migration. So, excessive care has to be taken and the process of migration has to be done under the supervision of experts. All possible security solutions have to be implemented to make sure there is no data outflow or breach.
One common myth in cloud migration is that companies frequently assume that the cloud provider will take care of all the security-related aspects. When migrating to a cloud, enterprises must think obtaining third-party reports about the cloud provider’s security. These reports often assist in planning a proper security assess to consider during and after the migration.
Whether you plan to migrate some of the physical servers or your whole data center, the obstructions are related: maintaining cloud data possession, control, security, and visibility. These concerns often hold organizations back. But they don’t have to.
The cloud does not offer many of the same security features as in-house servers. Because many cloud apps leverage virtualization, they do have the same benefits as in-house servers and systems. Specifically, with hardware performance, location, encryption and entropy. Because of this, many enterprises are uncertain to move mission critical applications and move to a hybrid model of cloud workloads combined with in-house bare-metal servers to secure data and applications. Cloud service providers should help their customer’s roadmap multiple scenarios for successful cloud migration.
Pre considerations for cloud migration:
Migrating existing physical and virtual workloads into clouds can be difficult and lingering without the right planning and homework. Here are some steps you should consider before deciding which cloud migration procedure is the best for your enterprise:
- Evaluate your inner processes and analyze your business needs.
- Determine the partnership conditions with the cloud provider.
- Do a test of how the new technology integrates into your business by migrate an application which is not very important to your business.
Here we are going to explain some security aspects when we move our on premises server to cloud:
Data Breaches:
More and more organizations are shifting to cloud computing and that is a word taken. But in addition to it, we are also witnessing something unwanted and that is the growing pain of enough data breach in the cloud. Wrong steps in planning and deployment of cloud-based security configurations lead to data breaches. As enterprises start migrating to cloud services, it is being increasingly challenging for the centralized IT departments to manage their companies IT infrastructures.
Data Loss:
Data loss may happen as a result of a disaster: when a disk drive dies without a backup, for example, or if the holder of encrypted data loses the key that unlocks it. Data can be lost as a result of human error in an indescribable variety of ways. And, of course, data can be lost due to a malicious attack – a data breach.
Account Hijacking:
Account hijacking is nothing new – businesses have been on high alert against methods used by cybercriminals such as phishing and fraud. But by adding cloud into the equation, the potential impact of this threat becomes extensively greater. Using stolen credentials, attackers can access vital areas of cloud computing services and leverage account access to pinch or hold sensitive data to ransom, spread malicious software or redirect users to illegitimate sites.
Insider Threat:
When the data gets migrated to cloud, which is a shared platform, the obvious outcome of this is that the data will be available to everyone for free unless it is secured and unauthorized access is prohibited. The data on cloud has led to an increase in the number of data breach incidences by the employees and partners of the enterprise itself and that may be due to sheer negligence or intentional means.
Malware Injection:
In Cloud Malware Injection Attack an attacker tries to insert malicious service or virtual machine into the cloud. In this type of attack attacker creates its own malicious service implementation module (SaaS or PaaS) or virtual machine instance (IaaS), and try to add it to the Cloud system. Then, the attacker has to behave so as to make it a valid service to the Cloud system that it is some new service implementation instance among the valid instances.
Denial of Service Attacks:
Denial-of-service (DoS) attacks are one of the major security challenges in the emerging cloud computing models. Currently, numerous types of DoS attacks are conducted against the various cloud services and resources, which target their availability, service level agreements, and performance.
Insufficient Due Diligence:
The due diligence assessment is critical in determining the risks and mitigation strategies that the cloud computing provider has put in place. Especially to the hiring organizations, there is a knowledge gap that can prevent sufficient exercise of due diligence when hiring a cloud service provider. Without knowing quite what they are contracting for, customers can find a mismatch between what they think they are getting and what a CSP can provide.
Shared Vulnerabilities:
Vulnerabilities in shared technology pose a threat to cloud computing. Cloud service providers share infrastructure, platforms, and applications. If vulnerability arises in any of these layers, it can affect everyone.
Security Points, which should be considered during Cloud migrations:
New security challenges- When migrating to a cloud based environment, companies need to take a hard look at their needs and the security of their providers, as well as their own internal policies.
Coordinated security policy- You will likely have some data on the cloud and some on your own servers. Plan for a coordinated security policy that covers both environments.
Strike a balance between privacy and security- A network or cloud provider under attack will continue to receive legitimate traffic. Parsing trusted sources from attack traffic, however, requires some decryption which exposes potentially confidential information. Look for tools, such as behavioural threat detection algorithms that partially decrypt the least amount of data necessary to sort good traffic from bad.
Be aware of what you have in the cloud- You either know your employees are using cloud-based apps without permission, or you should suspect they are. In their wake is a trail of vulnerabilities that can lead to data loss or exposure. Defend against the vulnerabilities in cloud-based application.
Consider your neighbour- Sharing space with a vulnerable organization could put you at risk. You need working knowledge of the architecture and security a cloud offers so that if hackers target your co-tenant, you won’t see outages, slowed apps, and the denial of users based on geography.
Make sure the cloud complies with your internal standards- Security protocols established by your cloud host may conflict with or fall short of those for your internal network. Double check to ensure that your provider’s platform conforms to industry and internal compliance standards, and if not, be ready to upgrade and modify security settings.
Treat attack detection like you would in-house- The biggest difference between monitoring for attacks at an internal data center and in the cloud is that some assets won’t be in your direct control. Detection protocols must sit in front of cloud based that some assets just as you would in your data center.
Know where your cloud vendor excels- Cloud vendors differentiate themselves on price, as well as on features like speed. Distinguish, cloud providers that excel at app hosting from those that focus on security and take a hard look whether a vendor fits your needs.
Segregate security duties – Be confident that the IT department has the ability to assess security.
Why choose us?
HEX64’s Cloud Migration Services prepares you to move from a virtual data center to the public cloud with a variety of solutions that will allow you to:
- Control privileged user and super-admin access.
- Guard against potential unauthorized copying.
- Overcome the lack of visibility.
- Mitigate the exposure of raw data.
- Maintain ownership of your encryption keys.
- Establish standard identity and data protection policies.
- Demonstrate definitive proof of access and data control in compliance audits.
Thank you for publishing this awesome article. Data security is always a safe and migration oriented protection for Data security. Thank you HEX64.