Should i trust cloud computing

Indeed, they noted in a paper last year, these features offer opportunities for security breaches. For example, cloud providers continuously monitor and measure activity within their networks, to better allocate shared resources and keep their costs down. But the collection of that metering data itself opens up a security hole, say Kaliski and Pauley. A devious customer could, for example, infer behavioral patterns of other customers by analyzing her own usage.

Despite these and other vulnerabilities, cloud customers can do quite a bit to boost their security. Businesses typically operate their in-house data networks according to the principle of least privilege, conferring to a given user only those privileges needed to do his or her job. The same rule should apply when using a cloud service. Though that may seem obvious, many companies fail to take this simple step.

In the future, trusted computing technology could make it possible for a customer to verify that the code running remotely in the cloud matches certain guarantees made by the cloud provider or attested to by a third-party auditor. Of course, the strongest protection you can give to the information you send off premises is to encrypt it. Is there such a thing as a totally secure cloud? But we, along with many other cloud-security researchers around the world, are constantly striving toward that goal.

One such effort we are involved in aims to develop and demonstrate a secure cloud infrastructure. With funding from the European Union and others, the three-year, TClouds is developing two secure cloud applications. The first will be a home health-care service that will remotely monitor, diagnose, and assist patients. The goal is to show how in-home health care can be improved cost-efficiently without sacrificing privacy.

The second application will be a smart street-lighting system for several Portuguese cities. Currently, the streetlights are switched on and off by means of a box that sits in a power station. The TClouds system will allow workers to log into a Web portal and type in when the lights should turn on and off in a given neighborhood; the use of smart meters will help control energy consumption.

Although the technology is a major focus of TClouds, it is also addressing the legal, business, and social aspects of cloud computing. Probably not.

The demand for basic, low-cost cloud services will remain, but providers will also offer services with quantifiable and guaranteed security levels. In the future, individual clouds will most likely give way to federations of clouds.

The social-networking sites Facebook and LinkedIn are already doing this. So even if one provider suffers an outage, customers will still enjoy continued service. Once that happens, reaching out to a cloud provider for your computing needs will be as commonplace as getting hooked up to the gas or electric company.

A cryptography expert concerned with cloud security, Cachin likes to start the day with a 5 a. Schunter, technical leader of the European Union—funded TClouds project, prefers bicycling to all other forms of transportation. To continue operating during pandemic-related shutdowns, organizations around the world underwent digital transformations. Examples include using remote technology to collaborate with employees and customers and employing automation to improve customer experiences.

Now, as the world tries to determine the new normal, many companies are expanding the use of digital transformation as a tool for growth.

A recent McKinsey survey on digital transformation during the COVID pandemic shows that organizations sped up the digitization of their customer and supply chain operations after more consumers shifted to online ordering. Companies that lost revenue in the past few years tended to be behind in using digital technology, the survey found.

How can you ensure your organization is prepared for a digital society? Understanding Key Concepts. Technical professionals can come away with an understanding of how digital transformation changes organizations and reshapes market niches while learning about the concept of technological ecosystems. Drivers of Digital Transformation.

Learn about communications artificial intelligence, big data, and digital twins. Forecasting Tools and Methods. Explore tools and applications that can be used to look into the future. Game-Changing Opportunities. This course explores the impact advanced technology is likely to have on industries including agriculture, energy, education, finance, and health care.

Implementation—From Theory to Practice. This session focuses on psychological, social, and political considerations that could help with deployment. You can protect yourself by securing additional encryption for your cloud services , and making sure to follow best practices when it comes to choosing, changing, and securing your passwords.

Data is becoming increasingly important , and that data can take many forms. It might be an important spreadsheet that keeps track of your company finances, a document that contains your trade secrets, or a CRM platform with details on all your most important clients. In any case, this is vital information, and people have a vested interest in guarding that information however they can.

More than just worrying about the possibility of those files being accessed by someone else through a hack or impersonation attempt, people sometimes desire an innate sense of possession and control over those files. Some people hate the idea of relying on the cloud to access their most important services, since it requires an internet connection. But still, if your internet connection is unreliable, or if you suffer a neighborhood-wide outage, it could prevent you from using any of the apps you need to be productive, possibly wiping out a day of productivity.

We examined and categorized existing research and practice of trust mechanisms for cloud computing in five categories— reputation based, SLA verification based, transparency mechanisms self-assessment and information revealing , trust as a service, and formal accreditation, audit, and standards. Most current work on trust in the cloud focus narrowly on certain aspects of trust; our thesis is that this is insufficient.

Trust is a complex social phenomenon, and a systemic view of trust mechanism analysis is necessary. In this paper we take a broad view of trust mechanism analysis in cloud computing and develop a somewhat informal and abstract framework as a route map for analyzing trust in the clouds.

To support this mechanism, we propose a general structure of evidence-based trust judgment, which provides a basis to infer the trust in a cloud entity from the belief in the attributes that entity has, and in which, based on the semantics of trust, we define the attributes to be examined are in a space of two-dimensions — domain of expectancy and source of trust including competency, integrity, and goodwill.

Future research will focus on mathematically formal frameworks for reasoning about trust, including modeling, languages, and algorithms for computing trust. His research mainly focuses on 1 formal theories of trust, including the formal semantics of trust, measurement of trust, calculus of trust, trust evolution, and trust mechanisms; 2 applications of formal trust models in distributed computing and open networks, such as trust in cloud computing; 3 information assurance, including security policies for cross-domain information sharing, and formal models combining role-based access control, mandatory access control, and attribute-based access control.

David M. Nicol is the Franklin W. His research interests include high-performance computing, simulation modeling and analysis, and security.

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Enomaly Inc Accessed on 18 Jan. Download references. This material is based upon research sponsored by the U. The U. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation thereon. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar. Correspondence to Jingwei Huang. JH carried out the study of trust in clouds and drafted the manuscript; DMN helped develop the concepts, reviewed, and revised the manuscript.

Both authors read and approved the final manuscript. Reprints and Permissions. Huang, J. Trust mechanisms for cloud computing. J Cloud Comp 2, 9 Download citation. Received : 23 October Accepted : 09 April Published : 24 April Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:. Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. Our software was designed to deliver a much more secure way of sharing content.

Dropbox also encourages companies to use two-factor authentication - passwords supplemented by a one-time code generated by a different device, such as a smartphone or fob. Well, that depends on the quality of your cloud provider compared to that of your own IT department.

Most of the major data breaches that have taken place over the last five years, from Sony to Ashley Madison, TalkTalk to Target, have been from internal, not cloud-based, databases, says Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm, Imperva. But he adds: "There is always an inherent threat that administrative personnel working for a cloud provider could access your machines or data from within - that's a business risk you are taking.

This is why the major cloud providers give customers the option to handle their own encryption keys, meaning no-one inside the provider could get access even if they wanted to. And some companies are now adopting a "hybrid" approach - keeping their more sensitive data in a private cloud and other data and applications in the public cloud. Good point. But even this understandably cautious sector is gradually beginning to trust it. Late last year, US bank Capital One said it was reducing the number of its own data centres from eight to three by and moving a lot of its processes and product development to AWS.

And Towergate Insurance recently announced that it was migrating its IT infrastructure to the public cloud as well. The major public cloud providers offer a number of data centres - AWS covers 12 regions globally - storing multiple copies of customer data. So if one centre is destroyed in an earthquake or other natural disaster, your data is still safe. But concerns around data privacy, particularly in Europe following the rescinding of the Safe Harbour data sharing agreement and the Edward Snowden leaks , mean providers are increasingly offering the option to host data in customers' own regions.