Cloud computing, without a doubt, has become the numero uno choice for many businesses. Besides bringing down IT costs, it provides the much-needed agility to businesses, paves the way for new business models and scalability. That said, one still can’t call it a paragon of virtue. The major concern here is the risk of data exposure to unwanted users especially since the data is present in virtual machines. And how about your cloud service provider having easy access to your vital business information. Questions like these and the following factors still make businesses wary of cloud computing:

• Multiple tenants share the same infrastructure available over the cloud

• No regulations for cloud service providers to clear disk space and ensure that existing data is not compromised

• No way out to keep a check on IT security intelligence and lack of risk management

• Chances of data exposure to a person who does not even work for the respective company

• Problems related to data mobility and legal issues

So, that brings us to the next set of questions:

• How businesses opting for cloud computing can ensure that their data is not a subject to security breach?

• Or whether their business information is safe if they decide to move to some other cloud service provider?

You could deploy a three-pronged strategy to prevent someone uncalled-for from accessing your data on the cloud.

• The first step towards strengthening data security is data lockdown. It entails encryption of data which makes it impossible to read in simple text form. There is a huge consensus among technology experts that encryption of data goes a long way in ensuring protection of data on the cloud. So, never trivialize the importance of implementing data encryption empowered by a strong key management solution. It’s recommended to conduct audit of the entire encryption and key management solution. The first step also involves strong key management system to refrain any unauthorized person from accessing confidential business information.

• Next step requires ensuring that only authorized users have access to data on the cloud.

• The third is setting up security intelligence to detect security-breach risks well in time to mitigate them.

Apart from these, before adopting new technologies like cloud computing (AWS Data integration services) and virtualization, one must make it 100% sure to review security policies and procedures to figure out how cloud providers are going to ensure safety of your data.

You can also improve the protection of applications on the cloud by designing them in a manner that no one comes to know if they are running on cloud or your own servers. Web application firewalls can help in keeping the risk of outside attacks at bay.