The popularity of cloud services has increased exponentially in recent years. The prospects of saving on capital and operational expenditures have been significant driving forces in influencing companies to adopt cloud services. Scalability and elasticity are also key drivers that encourage companies to move to the cloud. However, moving to the cloud comes with a lot of challenges. Security is a big concern for organizations that want to migrate to the cloud.

Data Security

An organization’s data is among its most valuable assets. Therefore, data security plays a large part for many organizations when moving to the cloud. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) keep the exact location of their data centers secret. While this is a recognized best-practice in physical security, many potential customers are uncomfortable with storing data in the cloud because of the fear of not knowing the location of their data.

Data sovereignty also plays a big part in this. Organizations want to avoid legal complications that could potentially make their data inaccessible to them. Compliance with regulations like GDPR is also a key concern for organizations. Violation of GDPR can attract heavy financial penalties, which most organizations want to avoid. There are many other regulations the violations of which are equally expensive. For this reason, many organizations prefer storing sensitive data such as that which contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on premise.

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) systems are critical to an organization. Accidental data deletion might occur from the organization’s side. The Service-level Agreement (SLA) might dictate that the CSP should facilitate the restoration of systems and information when such incidents occur. If the CSP cannot fulfill the SLA, the customer could incur heavy losses. Organizations also want to be ensured of the security of their backups. In case of data loss or data corruption, organizations would (Read more...)