Why Cloud Security is Essential for Every Organization?

Posted on August 28, 2023August 28, 2023 by Idexcel Technologies

In today’s digital age, where data is important for businesses and cyber threats are constantly evolving, cloud security has emerged as a critical necessity for every organization. The rapid adoption of cloud computing has transformed the way businesses operate, offering unprecedented flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. However, this paradigm shift also brings forth a range of security challenges that organizations must address to safeguard their sensitive information and maintain the trust of their customers. In this article, we will delve into the key reasons why cloud security is essential for every organization.

1. Data Breach Prevention

The occurrence of data breaches can cause severe disruptions to organizations, resulting in financial losses, reputational damage, and legal consequences. Cloud security provides robust measures to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches. With proper encryption, access controls, and authentication protocols in place, organizations can ensure that their sensitive data remains safe and confidential, even in a shared cloud environment.

2. Regulatory Compliance

Various industries are subject to strict regulatory frameworks governing the storage and protection of data. Cloud security solutions often come with compliance features that help organizations meet these requirements. Whether its healthcare data governed by HIPAA or financial data under PCI DSS, a robust cloud security strategy ensures that organizations remain compliant with industry-specific regulations.

3. Scalability Without Compromising Security

One of the key advantages of cloud computing is its scalability. Organizations can easily scale up or down based on their needs, but this scalability should not come at the cost of security. Cloud security solutions are designed to seamlessly integrate with the evolving infrastructure, ensuring that as organizations grow, their security posture remains intact.

4. Mitigation of Advanced Threats

Cyber threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated, with hackers employing advanced techniques to breach even the most fortified systems. Cloud security leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to detect and mitigate these evolving threats in real time. By analyzing patterns and anomalies across a vast dataset, cloud security systems can identify potential breaches before they cause significant damage.

5. Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Unforeseen events such as natural disasters, hardware failures, or cyberattacks can disrupt business operations. Cloud security solutions often include robust disaster recovery features that enable organizations to quickly recover data and applications, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.

6. Cost-Efficiency

While investing in cloud security might seem like an additional expense, it is a cost-effective approach in the long run. The financial impact of a security breach far outweighs the investment in proactive security measures. Moreover, cloud security eliminates the need for organizations to invest heavily in on-premises infrastructure and maintenance.

7. Flexibility and Collaboration

Cloud security facilitates secure collaboration among employees, partners, and clients, regardless of their geographic locations. This flexibility enhances productivity and innovation, allowing teams to work together seamlessly while ensuring that sensitive information is protected.

8. Reputation and Trust

Maintaining the trust of customers and stakeholders is paramount for any organization. A single data breach can erode years of hard-earned reputation. Robust cloud security measures demonstrate an organization’s commitment to protecting customer data, thereby enhancing trust and credibility.

9. Centralized Security Management

Managing security across various on-premises systems can be complex and resource-intensive. Cloud security offers centralized management, allowing organizations to monitor, update, and enforce security policies consistently across their entire infrastructure.

10. Future-Readiness

As technology continues to evolve, organizations need to be prepared for the security challenges of tomorrow. Cloud security providers are dedicated to staying ahead of emerging threats, ensuring that organizations are equipped with the latest tools and strategies to combat evolving cyber risks.

In conclusion, the importance of cloud security cannot be overstated in today’s digital landscape. With the benefits of cloud computing also come the responsibilities of securing valuable data and maintaining the trust of stakeholders. From preventing data breaches and ensuring compliance to enabling scalability and fostering collaboration, cloud security is an investment that yields invaluable returns in terms of safeguarding sensitive information and securing the future of the organization.

Contact our cloud security experts and protect your valuable and sensitive business data.

Cloud Security Challenges for Enterprises

Posted on March 20, 2019January 21, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

To expand business reach owners are moving to cloud-based environments where they have the flexibility of choosing the capacity of the cloud based on their relevant requirements. Additionally, the cloud gives you the option of accessing your system files and making adjustments to them anytime, anywhere. In short, the cloud is cheaper, more efficient, and market ready.

However, security has long been a concern for cloud-based services, and this is the reason why some firms still refuse to move their application to the cloud. Some of the leading such challenges are outlined below to help you understand the matter.

Tackling DDoS Attacks

Any enterprise that collects more data becomes prone to malicious attacks. One of the most prominent of these attacks is the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks which can cripple a server for hours or even days; these are designed to overload the server with malicious commands that continue running on the server and consume exponential amounts of system ram so that the server doesn’t run smoothly. These attacks may be thwarted if we first take proper measures well in advance, such as deploying DDoS protection that is specifically designed to prevent this attack. Eliminating the possibility of these attacks will help a company restore its compromised wealth, trust, and brand authority.

Avoiding Data Breaches

Another prevalent type of security challenge is data breaches that take within the server; these breaches are mostly external, but sometimes the internal members of the service providers also become a reason for the violation. More than to the customer, a data breach is a threat to the service provider. The service provider has to meet several security compliances and policies. A failure to keep those intact policies results in direct defamation of the brand of the service provider. Therefore, the service providers take proper measures to eliminate those threats and use provider as well as customer lever encryption. Most of the time, the breach happens due to the customer’s improper conduct of sensitive information.

As a necessary security measure, sensitive data on the cloud must be encrypted and given minimal access especially when the cloud is public. Further, choosing the right vendor who gives you added securities such as firewall and software support system would also minimize the probability of a data breach.

Overcoming Data Loss

Another kind of security challenge is tackling data loss from the cloud. Data files can become corrupted in the cloud for several reasons which include improper planning, data mixing, and mishandling. Again, the service provider does not have much space to be responsible for these threats. While maintaining your data, especially the system files, make sure that you close all portals before leaving the session. As a fundamental measure, always keep at least one copy of the data with you, in your drives. The only way you can bring back your data will be that extra copy of the data. It’s very crucial, so make sure you have made the copy.

Strengthening Access Points

One of the actual advantages of the cloud is that it gives you the flexibility of accessing your data from different virtual points. That is, even though your data is primarily stored in one server, you can potentially access it from anywhere else where you have a portal. However, these portals are not always secured sufficiently. To be maintained, security measures require time and funding. Increasing the numbers of access points will invite massive budget imbalance. In such a scenario, the access points not providing sufficient security might fall prey to hackers and cause breaches or loss of data. As a solution, one might want to restrict the numbers of access points so that a proper security model for these access points can be maintained.

Prompt Notifications and Alerts

This challenge sprouts from the multiplicity of access points. As pointed out earlier, we should aim to restrict the numbers of access points. Now, even if a threat arises, it will be easier to locate and eliminate. Additionally, the notification and alerts system will be able to function better, as it won’t seem to spam the notification system. Since the notification system is the cornerstone of your security system, it must be properly maintained—the messages should be prompt, clear, and explanatory. If not kept in such a manner, the notifications won’t make sense to everyone in the company, nor they would be informed in time.

With the right parameters, one can easily tackle these cloud security challenges for an enterprise. Just have the right service provider, technology, and planning by your shoulder to keep the environment running smoothly.

Also Read

Why Enterprises Should Adopt a Multi-Cloud Strategy
The Differences Between Cloud and On-Premises Computing
Best Practices for Using DevOps in the Cloud
The Challenges of Multi-Cloud Environments

Best Practices for Cloud Security

Posted on February 6, 2019January 21, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

There was once a time when cloud security systems were very much able to tackle imminent threats through their inbuilt support systems. But, hackers have pushed forward, and it would appear that no data is secure from threats if additional security is not put in place. However, there are some handy precautions that you can take to safeguard your data from slipping into wrong hands. Read this article to learn more about best practices for maintaining and improving cloud security.

Transfer Encryption
First and foremost, you must ensure that the encryption of data in transition is end-to-end. Third parties being able to look into data has turned out to be one of the primary sources of data breaches. Companies should conduct all interactions on servers over SSL transmission (TLS 1.2) to ensure optimum security. Also, the SSL should be programmed in such a way that it terminates only within the cloud service provider network.

Storage Encryption
Although it is necessary to encrypt data in transition, encrypting stored data is no less critical. Most of the data collected will happen to be sensitive in most companies. If you have that data, it becomes your responsibility — keeping stored data encrypted keeps it intact from the threats that come from within; this also helps you comply with privacy policies, regulatory principles, and obligations of your company vis-à-vis particular client or company as a whole. Generally, a cloud service provider provides field-level encryption where the customers get to specify the fields they want to be encrypted. However, AES-256 is an excellent tool for encrypting data on cloud disks as it also generates regularly rotated master key that helps keep the encryption keys safe.

User-Level Data Security
You must opt for role-based access control (RBAC) features through which you will be able to enable your customers to set user-specific access and grant specific permissions to their data. You must ensure that you are not defying any law; therefore, you cannot take non-granted looks into the user’s data. Thus, add protective layers to the data to meet compliance with data security standards.

Vulnerability Testing
You should rigorously use the vulnerability and incident response tools as provided by your service provider. Solutions from these incident response tools render automated security assessments which can test security threats and decrease the levels, and threat severity, in critical security audits. For better security, these tools should be used rigorously, almost on a daily basis. But, depending on the nature of your data, the assessment cycle can be readjusted, and auto cycles can be scheduled.

Deletion Policy
You must never leave data unattended. Data has its cycles of use, and if the cycle of one data set is complete and no further processing is required, that data should be deleted from the server. Review the deletion policy from your provider and make sure that your information is programmed to be removed at a pre-specified time as mentioned in your contract.

Certifications
Another overarching measure for security enhancement is having proper compliance certifications — check what certifications your provider has. The two most essential certifications are PCI DSS, which signifies that the SaaS provider has undergone detailed audits that ensure secure storage and transmission of sensitive data, and SOC Type II, which tells that the internal risk management processes, regulatory compliance oversight, as well as vendor management programs are being carried out by the provider successfully.

Virtual Private Cloud
Having a private virtual cloud and network has its security advantages. In this scenario, you have entire control and access to your data and no other client. You don’t need to share the cloud with others, which inevitably results in increased security. The customer can securely connect to the corporate data, and all traffic in their VPC can be routed directly to their corporate data center.

These are some of the practices that must be incorporated for cloud security. The essential enhancer of cloud security is ultimately your service provider. So, make sure that you have one that’s trustable and experienced.

Also Read

Top 7 Benefits of Managed Cloud Services
Why You Should Consider DevOps for Your Organization
The Top 5 Advantages of the Hybrid Cloud

Security Advantages of Cloud-Based Systems for Media and Entertainment Businesses

Posted on July 26, 2018January 13, 2021 by Idexcel Technologies

Cloud-based systems have emerged as a viable platform to address the security issues of both media and entertainment businesses across the globe. Of course, the boom in the sector has paved the way for a plethora of opportunities for the entertainment industry, but, on the flip side, the amounts of risk involved has also increased tremendously.

The incidents of cybercrime have affected many of the top media service providers due to this reason, smaller businesses remain at risk of possible intellectual property rights violations. However, the cloud-based storage systems offer a practical algorithm to process and manage a vast workflow securely.

In addition to the numerous advantages such as ease of access and secure storage of data, security features of cloud-based solutions make the Cloud one of the best possible options for the media and entertainment businesses.

Let’s have a look at some of the most prominent security advantages of cloud-based systems.

Data Encryption
Robust data encryptions within cloud-based security systems have substantially reduced the possibilities of data breaches; these solutions offer a layered approach that consists of security intelligence, key management, and secure access controls. Cloud-based systems give the required freedom to companies to choose their users who will be accessing the data that has been outsourced to the cloud. This way, any attempts to tamper with personal or profession data can be thwarted.

Most companies face the threat of internal data theft by their employees, and stronger access controls can nip these threats in the bud. The multi-layered security features weed out the possibilities of a breach of data to a great extent. Data, irrespective of its type, needs to be protected at all times. Any violations can be hazardous to the goodwill and the functioning of an enterprise.

Avoid DDoS Attacks
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can result in hefty losses for entertainment companies. Hackers target the website by directing traffic from several sources to the end website, and, as a result, the system gets overwhelmed. These DDoS attacks may tarnish the image of the company, as clients begin to lose trust.

Cloud-based security systems guard this imminent threat with real-time scanning of potential risks; this function is further used as a warning tool for various systems which allows for the tracking of incoming threats and attacks instantly – this enables website admins to divert the traffic to several different locations.

Regulatory Compliance
Cloud computing security solutions usually provide reliable SOC1 and SOC2 certifications to the entertainment businesses. These certifications ensure periodic scrutiny of data and all types of possible glitches. Cloud-based solutions manage the requisite infrastructure for regulatory compliance and the protection of data. Detailed AWS reports about management of security controls ensure all organizations focus on their business operations, without worrying about compliance requirements.

Secure Storage
Traditional storage solutions don’t provide any protection against possible disasters that have the potential to erase required data from devices. Cloud computing allows the users to store their data safely, thereby negating any mishaps that may affect the equipment.

Cloud storage solutions offer private, public, and hybrid solutions which the businesses may choose as per their requirements. The hybrid cloud storage systems allow the users to keep their data secure in the most effective manner.

Patch Management
The vulnerabilities of a website are often exploited by hackers to breach the security system of a company. Cloud service providers keep their sites up to date; further on, they ensure that no vulnerabilities exist. Moreover, cloud solutions offer real-time assistance to clients by providing companies with the option to scale cloud solutions during high traffic situations. This flexibility allows companies to reduce their cost of services substantially.

These large number of security features are quite flexible, agile, and affordable. Enhanced security features offer sufficient protection to the private and financial data of both media and entertainment companies and help to thwart data and intellectual property breaches. In this era of digitalization, where cybercrime has emerged as a norm, cloud-based solutions seem to be the best alternative to traditional security systems.

Also Read

Future of Business Intelligence in the Cloud
Securing Efficient Optimization through Multiple Cloud Applications Management
Benefits of Utilizing Enterprise Cloud Applications

Understanding Cloud Security and Its Importance

Posted on May 3, 2017October 18, 2019 by Idexcel Technologies

Cloud security is still an ever growing concern, despite the various set of advantages it provides to the individuals and companies alike. As per a recent survey, there are still close to 90% of companies which remain skeptical about putting in 100% trust in the Cloud infrastructure, simply due to the Cloud security problems.

Understanding Cloud security

Despite so many trust issues, there are a lot of things which organizations are yet to realize when it comes to Cloud security. The Cloud is not an insecure platform; the security model is relatively different than some of the other platforms available in the market currently. Due to this very reason, there are a lot of new relationships which need to be fulfilled with respect to data storage.

Cloud centers can be quite secure, especially more secure than their traditional counterparts. However, in order to understand Cloud security, the security aspect needs to be understood in the right context.

Cloud security myths busted

In order to ensure maximum security, it is imperative to review the security posture and understand what controls need to be put in place to enforce it. In order to be secure, any organization wants a platform that can offer an array of services which can address different requirements in one go.

• Breaches: However, a lot of people feel that there are a lot of breaches within the Cloud storage. On this day, it can be clearly stated that this is one of the biggest myths till date. Internet threats are a bigger threat as compared to Cloud security breaches, simply because Internet attacks are dynamic and can’t be detected easily.
• Not the client’s concern: At the same time, when it comes to maintenance, a lot of people differ in their views. Some people feel that since the Cloud services are provided by a third party, the security will always be lax. However, that is never the case.
• No management needed: While the infrastructure of the Cloud is managed, it is not safe to assume that the security is also a managed service. For this very reason, given this assumption, many client organizations assume that the service provider has taken all the necessary precautions for securing the Cloud service, which often ends up creating rather than solving Cloud security related problems.
• Single tenant systems vs. multi tenant systems: Multi tenant systems offer double security when it comes to a comparison with single tenant systems. There is a double security layer, which makes it even more secure than its counterpart. With multi tenant systems, there is always a third layer of protection called logical content isolation, which helps take the security up a notch.

Importance of Cloud Security:

When it comes to the importance of Cloud security, there are no two ways about it. With so many recent breaches and technological attacks, maintaining security has become all the more important. For this very reason, companies are become more and more particular about risk and the unknown disadvantages they fear of the unknown. Since the Cloud structure is still relatively a mystery, there is a lot to be investigated, especially from a security perspective. But this does not negate the fact that organizations are increasingly looking for Cloud service providers which are stable, secure and offer more than one layer of security for their client’s data.

Cloud based QA Infrastructure

Posted on June 11, 2014October 18, 2019 by Idexcel Technologies

A silver bullet to ward off traditional challenges

If you have some spare time at the office, spare a thought to the CIO in the IT industry. A blitzkrieg of challenges invite the CIO every day as he settles down on his desk after greeting his colleagues, rather ironically for him, a “good morning”. Here’s how the dice rolls for him every day at work:

Existing Scenario:

a) Shrinking budget

b) Increasing cost pressures

Expectations:

a) Cut IT spend

b) Deliver value and technology edge

Preferred Solution:

a) Enhance ROI generated from IT components

b) Increase focus on QA infrastructure and maintenance costs

c) Lean on test managers to reduce QA infra costs as they form a major chunk of IT infrastructure budgeting.

Cutting costs, a Catch-22 situation

On the other side, test managers face a catch-22 situation as cut in QA infrastructure spend could potentially impact the quality of software deliverables. Here are a few examples of the challenges that drive cost of IT upwards while creating and managing QA infrastructure:

Testing operations are recurring but non-continuous. This means test infrastructure is sub-optimally utilized and therefore has a significant impact on ROI.
Testing work areas span a wide spectrum such as On-time QA environment provisioning for multiple projects, decommissioning of QA environment to other projects, QA environment support, managing incidents, and managing configurations for multiple projects. All these necessitate an organization to allocate and maintain proportionate skilled resources at all times which in turn drives costs upwards.
CIOs and Test Managers are expected to ensure testing is commissioned on recommended hardware, because most of the issues linked to later stages of the quality gate are attributed to testing on inadequate hardware. This again accounts for a significant chunk of the total IT budget
Creating appropriately defined QA infrastructure up and running in time (including procurement and leasing of these elements) to meet the set timelines demands more IT staffing resources
Many Test Managers give the goby to staging environment and directly deploy to production because of budget constraints, however creating a staging environment that mimics production is more critical to quality of software in production. Creating such environment also necessitates huge chunk of total IT budget.
Today’s complex application architecture involves multiple hardware and software tools which require a lot of investment in terms of time, money, resources on coordination, managing SLAs, procurement; with multiple vendors. All these taken together add up more allocations in the budget.
For conducting performance testing, test managers need to set up a huge number of machines in the lab to generate desired number of virtual users demanding more budget from CIOs

The Case for QA infrastructure as a Service in Cloud

All the above challenges force CIOs and Test Managers to move away from on-premises QA infrastructure and scout for alternatives such as cloud computing for creating and managing QA environments. Organizations are leveraging cloud computing to significantly lower IT infra spend towards QA environments while at the same time deliver value, quality and efficient QA lifecycle. Already, many players, big and small, such as Amazon, IBM, Skytap, CMT, Joyent, Rackspace; offer QA infrastructure as a service in cloud. Using this service, organizations can set up QA infrastructure in cloud, shifting focus from CAPEX to OPEX. CIOs too are able to significantly squeeze both CAPEX and OPEX elements thereby meeting the budget cap without compromising on the quality of the solution.

How does it work?

Assume that a QA team needs a highly complex test environment configuration in order to conduct testing on a new application. Instead of setting up on-premises QA environment (which requires hardware procurement, set up, maintenance), a QA team member logs in to the QA infrastructure service provider’s self-service portal and:

* Creates an environment template with each tier of the application and network elements like web server, application servers, load balancer, database and storage. For example a QA team member can fill the web server template like “web server with large instance and windows server 2008”.

* Submits the request through the IaaS service provider’s portal

* The service provider provisions this configuration and hardware in minutes and sends a mail to the QA team.

* The QA team uses this testing environment for required time and completes the testing.

* the QA team releases the test environment at the end of the testing cycle.

* For subsequent releases, the environment can simply be set up from the same template and the QA team can deploy the new code and start testing.

* The service provider bills for only the actual usage of the QA environment.

How does it help?

Elastic and scalable data center with no CAPEX investment: CIOs/Test Managers don’t have to worry about budgeting, procurement, setting up and maintenance of QA environment. Organizations simply need to develop applications and create a template of the required environment and request the service provider who enables the test environment. The QA team then deploys the application on a production like environment, thus saving time and expenses over traditional on-premises deployment. This shifts the focus from CAPEX to OPEX for IT infrastructure spending.

QA teams can provision their own environment: With this facility, QA teams can provision their own environment on-demand, rather than going though long IT procurement process, to set up an on-premises test environment.

Multiple parallel environments: QA teams can create different environments with different platforms and application stacks, with no investment in capex and multiple hardware, reducing the Go to Market time.

Minimize resource hoarding: Instead of setting up on-premises test environments and investing capital on hardware, QA teams can deploy the environments on cloud on a need-basis and release the resources after completion of testing. Some service providers provide ‘suspend and resume’ facility, in which case QA teams can suspend an environment saving the entire state including memory and resume at a later stage when required.

The bottom line: QA environments in cloud are lifesavers for companies. CIOs are slowly adapting cloud based QA infrastructure and moving away from on-premises QA infrastructures which demands huge CAPEX and OPEX and yields less ROI. Cloud-based QA infrastructure, if managed smartly, is a silver bullet that can neutralize most of the challenges faced by CIOs/Test Managers in traditional QA infrastructure.