SENG2250 System and Network Security

Introduction

Cloud computing is an information technology pattern which allows access to a shared pool of higher-level services and configurable system resources. The resources can be acquired from the Internet sources through web-based tools and the applications (Almorsy, Grundy & Müller, 2016). The cloud computing provides the cloud base storage facility to the organizations or individuals.

The report explains the cloud infrastructure model, cloud deployment model. The report illustrates the issues related to cloud computing and the possible solutions by which cloud business can be conducted effectively.

Applications of Cloud Computing

The organizations can choose to store files in the cloud rather than local storage device or proprietary hard drive. The users can access the files anywhere anytime and from any devices. The cloud computing offers several advantages. Cloud computing reduces the hardware cost and the maintenance cost, it facilitates accessibility all-round the globe. The cloud computing offers flexibility in the business operations. It also automated the process of the business activities (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). The customer need not have to worry about the updates or the upgrades. The cloud vendors daily update the cloud OS, cloud applications and the cloud services. Thus both the organizations and the individuals can be benefitted with the help of the cloud computing.

Cloud Computing Service Model

Cloud computing services are classified as-

Infrastructure as Service (IaaS): The cloud vendor offers virtualized computational resources, computer network and storage. IaaS typically hosts the infrastructure components on the prevalent data centre, which includes networking hardware, servers as well as storage (Khalil, Khreishah & Azeem, 2014). IaaS is based on virtualization technology. Amazon EC2 is one of the famous IaaS providers.

Platform as a service (PaaS): PaaS providers offer platform, tools and other business services by which organizations using the cloud services can design, deploy and manage cloud applications over the cloud platform (Srinivasan, 2014). PaaS provider generally hosts software and hardware on its own infrastructure. Google Apps and Microsoft Windows Azure offer PaaS service.

Software as a Service: Software as a service is one software distribution model where the third-party provider hosts applications and a third party makes all those applications available to the individuals or the organizations over the Internet. SaaS eliminates the hardware expenses, maintenance and provisioning.

Cloud Deployment Model

Public cloud

The public cloud infrastructure is situated on the premises of cloud vendor or cloud service provider. The individuals or the organisations can share the same infrastructure pool with limited configuration. Any individuals can access the cloud storage base and can store the data in the same cloud storage base (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). It is known to provide scalable, dynamically provisioned and virtualized resources available over the internet.

Private cloud

The private cloud infrastructure is usually owned by only one user and the cloud resources are not shared. The individuals have the physical control over the cloud infrastructure and it is considered more secured compared to public cloud. In case of public cloud, everyone shares the same cloud infrastructure.

Hybrid cloud

Hybrid cloud is actually a mixture of both public cloud infrastructure and private cloud infrastructure (Zhao, Li & Liu, 2014). The hybrid cloud offers the flexibility where the individuals have the opportunity to use the private cloud infrastructure alongside the public cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Computing Security Problems

There are several issues associated with cloud computing and this report explains all the issues-

Security Issues

Data at rest is the security concern in case of cloud computing. Users store all the sensitive data in the cloud and these data can be accessed can be anywhere anytime and from any device. Data theft can lead to data loss for the cloud vendors. The data loss occurs if the server shuts down all of a sudden (Wei et al., 2014). The data loss can also occur with the effect of the natural disaster. The physical data location is considered to be one of the security issues in cloud computing.

Privacy Issues

The employees’ data and the customers’ data are stored in the cloud database. The data can get hacked due to the security breaches. The hackers can steal all the customers’ details, and use for their benefits. The hackers can modify all the confidential data of the customers and can even delete all the files of the system (Hashem et al., 2015). The customers’ privacy can get threatened due to the hackers’ attack. The organizations store financial data and other confidential data. The loss of the confidential data can lead to privacy risk. The cloud computing can be used effectively if security is implied properly by cloud vendors and the users. The cloud vendors must have to follow the regulatory reforms and they will have to make sure that customers have trust in privacy and security of data.

Application issues

The cloud vendors should monitor and maintain the security of cloud applications and they will have to make sure that the organizations and cloud database remain safe from the clutches of the malicious attack. The cloud applications can be hacked by the attackers and the sensitive data can get stolen.

Threat issues

Data Breaches

Organizations store all the confidential data of the employees and the customers in the cloud database. All the financial data of the employees and customers are stored by the management staffs in the database. The attackers, however, can gain entry to the organizations' system and database and can conduct a malicious activity (Singh, Jeong & Park, 2016). The hackers or the attackers take the opportunity of the insecure network and insecure system and makes that system vulnerable.  

Data loss

The organizations store data in the cloud database. The data stored in the database can get corrupted or damaged due to the computer sudden shutdown. The data can get lost due to server shutdown as well. A natural disaster like earthquake and fire also leads to data loss (Pancholi & Patel, 2016). If the organizations do not keep a backup of the data, there is a possibility of data loss.

Account Hijacking

The hackers hijack one’s account and the hackers try to imitate the users. The hackers enter into user’s account unethically and conduct malicious activities. The intruders can send false information, can manipulate the data. No native APIs are required for the users to register login into their database and system (Hussein & Khalid, 2016). For this reason, the organizations have pretty high chance of account hijacking.

Insecure APIs threat

APIs are used in the organization to accumulate logs from the applications, it helps to integrate the storage components and the database. API is one of the ways that the mobile application can connect with back-end services and connect with the website. APIs provide the facility to authenticate users (Chang, Kuo & Ramachandran, 2016). Thus activity monitoring, API from the authentication and access control must be configured properly to safeguard the organizations.

Denial of Service attack

The intruders hack the system and cloud account and sabotage the system. The DoS attack restricts the legitimate users to use their own system and cloud account and database. DoS attack can cause severe harm to the users as DoS can refrain users to use the cloud services (Botta et al., 2016). The users will not be able to use the cloud account and the cloud services. They will also not be able to complete the task within the stipulated deadline.

Malicious intruders’ attack

The current employees and the former employees of the organization can be threat and risks for organizations. The employees can steal the vital data of the organization. The employees can modify the data and delete the data. They can share all those important data with some other enterprises (Rao & Selvamani, 2015). Those employees also share the cloud account’s data; sometimes they change the password as well. Those employees get access to the cloud account and destroy those files. Thus the entire business gets disrupted due to the insider attack.

Abuse of cloud service

Most of the cloud vendors do not apply a strong registration system. The individuals or the organizations with a valid credit card may register. Soon after the registration, they can start using the cloud database (Tan, Jia & Han, 2015). The hackers via brute force attack get access to the system and database.

Sharing technological issue

IaaS cloud vendors offer services in an efficient way by sharing of infrastructure. However, the IaaS is not suitable for the strong isolation properties for a multi-tenant architecture.

Cloud Computing Security Solutions

Vulnerability analysis

The Intrusion Detection System has the capability to detect the cyber attacks, and it provides solutions so that the cloud computing threats can be mitigated (Ahmed & Hossain, 2014). All the organizations must adopt the intrusion detection system to safeguard one’s cloud account, system and database.

Trusted Cloud vendor

The organisations must choose the cloud vendors wisely. The cloud vendors like Amazon AWS and Microsoft is known to provide the better cloud computing services. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure come with advanced security features as well by which the organisations can securely conduct the business activities over the cloud. CloudCmp provides the details with the comparison among all the cloud vendors like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, DropBox. The individuals and the organisations can choose the cloud vendor in terms of budget, in terms of in terms of features.

Using cloud services wisely

The cloud vendor should strengthen their registration and login procedures so that no one can access the cloud account so easily.

Checking security events

The cloud vendors and the organisations must make an appropriate agreement. The organisations must follow all the policies and the guidelines properly and should use the cloud services. On the other hand, the cloud vendors will have to take full responsibility if any security breaches or data loss occurs (Khalil, Khreishah & Azeem, 2014). The cloud service providers must report contingency, fulfil promises and must provide break remediation to ensure the security of cloud data stored by the organisations.

Regulations for Data Storage

There are various data storage regulations among which the EU, HIPAA and PCI DSS are considered the best. The cloud vendors must cater security solutions compliant with the mentioned regulations (Srinivasan, 2014). All these data protection policies or regulations will help to safeguard individuals' data or organisations' data.

Data Recovery Facilities

Cloud vendors must take the responsibility to recover data in case of data loss due to certain issues.  The cloud vendors will have to back up the users’ files and must promise to recover the confidential data of the users. They must adopt solutions to assure data recovery in case of any danger (Ali, Khan & Vasilakos, 2015). The cloud vendors must use the effective disk management in case of disaster management. The cloud vendors can adopt other security solutions like changing dirty page threshold, prediction of risky devices and its removal.

Enterprise Architecture

The organisations and the individuals those who are using the cloud services will have to take responsibility to safeguard data from their ends. They must use the advanced security solutions provided by the cloud vendors like the proxy server, firewalls, routers and servers.

Access Control

Cloud data access control must be implemented by the cloud vendors. The cloud vendors will have to take the responsibility and will have to make sure that only the legitimate users enter the system and no one else (Zhao, Li & Liu, 2014). The users will be asked every time when the users try to enter the system. Data breaches can get significantly reduce if the cloud vendors limit the access control.

Identification management

The cloud vendors can take the help of digital media and digital data to strengthen the data access control. The users should not only use the username, password but also, they should use the digital data to gain access to the cloud account (Wei et al., 2014). Leakage-resilient authentication can be helpful in improving the security services of the cloud database.

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the discourse that cloud computing is helpful to conduct the business activities online. The organisations can get agile, cost-effective service with the help of the cloud computing. The report has illustrated the cloud architecture in details. Along with that, the cloud security issues have been elaborated in the report. The security solutions have been explained in the report well. Recommendations have been made in the report following which the cloud vendors must provide secured cloud services so that the users can enjoy cloud services as well.

References

Ahmed, M., & Hossain, M. A. (2014). Cloud computing and security issues in the cloud. International Journal of Network Security & Its Applications, 6(1), 25.

Ali, M., Khan, S. U., & Vasilakos, A. V. (2015). Security in cloud computing: Opportunities and challenges. Information sciences, 305, 357-383.

Almorsy, M., Grundy, J., & Müller, I. (2016). An analysis of the cloud computing security problem. arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.01107.

Botta, A., De Donato, W., Persico, V., & Pescapé, A. (2016). Integration of cloud computing and internet of things: a survey. Future Generation Computer Systems, 56, 684-700.

Chang, V., Kuo, Y. H., & Ramachandran, M. (2016). Cloud computing adoption framework: A security framework for business clouds. Future Generation Computer Systems, 57, 24-41.

Hashem, I. A. T., Yaqoob, I., Anuar, N. B., Mokhtar, S., Gani, A., & Khan, S. U. (2015). The rise of “big data” on cloud computing: Review and open research issues. Information Systems, 47, 98-115.

Hussein, N. H., & Khalid, A. (2016). A survey of Cloud Computing Security challenges and solutions. International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, 14(1), 52.

Khalil, I. M., Khreishah, A., & Azeem, M. (2014). Cloud computing security: A survey. Computers, 3(1), 1-35.

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