Threats across the clouds
There are number of threats associated with the clouds and these threats are ever increasing irrespective of the steps being taken to reduce the threats across the clouds these days. Among different threats identified across the cloud implementation few important threats and the corresponding impact on the cloud security are reviewed in this section and given as below
User threats: These threats are very common across the public clouds and occur mainly due to the improper and low standard cloud implementations. The main reasons for these user threats is that, if the user management and the identity management are at low standards, unauthorized users can access the data being stored across the clouds. Poor user management includes few cases like, suppose if an ex-employee of the cloud service provider can access the client data remotely, then it would become a major threat and the corresponding strategies should be handled by both the service providers and the customers.
Quality of the data: Quality of the data is the serious concern to be considered among all the possible threats across the cloud security issues. In general the service providers maintain the data of the clients and different users can have access to the data and can manipulate the data as per the business requirements. Frequent updates to the customer’s data should be handled in an appropriate manner and the integrity of the data could raise new threats always irrespective of the threat handling mechanism in place.
Change management: Change management is the crucial aspect to be considered across the security of the cloud. In general there are many chances, where the changes are imposed by the customers towards the services provided by the service providers and in some cases, these changes may lead to negative impact on the overall security of the cloud being provided. These changes can be either from the software or hardware side and a perfect change management mechanism should be in place, else there is lot of scope for security threats due to these changes.
Thus there are number of attacks and threats across the security of the clouds and the common risks associated with the cloud security include privileged user access, data disposal, data location and segregation and all these risks are perfectly handled by the large cloud computing service providers and big organizations. When the case comes to small organizations who are planning to move towards the cloud computing are stuck up with lot of issues and they are thinking twice to adopt the excellent features provided by the cloud computing mainly due to these security risks and across the literature there is no evidence towards this aspect.
There is an identified gap with respect to the small companies and their attitude towards the cloud security and I would like to use this gap and do my search in terms of the small organizations attitude towards the cloud computing and how they are planning to go with the cloud technologies by considering all the issues related to cloud computing in this research.