Five Ways To Evaluate Your Cloud Security

Five Ways to Evaluate your Cloud Security

In an earlier post, we spoke about how mobile and cloud hosting is transforming technology in today’s business arena. With more and more enterprises moving to the ‘cloud’ there is little doubt that the spotlight needs to be focused on making use of these solutions effectively and safely. BYOD adoption had made security concerns a priority item for many businesses and rightly so. In fact, cloud solutions are even slowly replacing conventional practices in many other situations as well, such as business presentations and this only highlights the need for you to pay special attention to your cloud security. Take a look at 5 ways in which you can do so:

1) Are the right services and information in the cloud?

Cloud solutions offer immense advantages and convenience but the fact remains that they do not do so across your entire range of technology services and information. Moving the right services and information to the cloud allows you to maximize the benefits you derive from such solutions without compromising your security and safety. In an Oracle report, Nelson, Senior Director of Cloud Security, explains how internal services that lack ‘resources, efficiency, rigor’ are ideal candidates for the cloud. He points out that these present low risk to the business while enhancing efficiency at the internal level.

2) Are you sacrificing security for speed?

A common problem, many businesses trade off security because they want to amp up speed of deployment when they switch to the cloud. The actual cost of failing to make sure adequate security is in place can be drastically high for your business. Making sure that the cloud solution has safety features should take precedence over the cloud deployment and this should be one of the first steps in evaluating your cloud’s security.

3) Is your cloud really right for you?

A surprising number of business owners are unaware that clouds can be of different kinds, each with its own set of features and specifications, each designed for a different purpose. When you are evaluating your cloud’s security you need to do so with your specific objective in mind. Only then can you really determine if it offers the kind of security that is demanded by the technology and information you will be moving there.

4) Do you have enough transparency from the cloud provider?

Moving critical data to the cloud makes you highly vulnerable unless the cloud provider employs world class security and privacy features. A critical part of evaluating your cloud security is to check if your provider offer utmost transparency, allowing you to see what security measures, are being employed and to what degree to ensure that your data/ technology is safe from unauthorized use.

5) Are there incident management processes in place?

What happens when there is a security breach in the cloud? Your cloud provider should have a clear, effective incident management and damage control plan in place so that this plan can be instantly deployed to minimize the data leak. Verifying if your provider has such a plan in place and whether it is a viable one should be one of your initial steps in evaluating cloud security.