How secure your data in the cloud?

It's been not so long since the concept of cloud computing started emerging. But the huge hype it has generated within such a short period of time suggests the amount of interest people have already gotten at it. And yes, it has to be of such strength to make such a solid impression on world-wide technical experts, that quickly. The business advantages may have been the reason for most organizations to adapt the cloud or it could be the huge hype which forced them towards the adaption. However, it's not quite clear how many of them have really thought about the pros and cons of it and made the best suited solutions for their organizations. This article is intended to provide an insight into some of the risks that are associated with the cloud which may be hidden yet important to be mindful of, within the scope of data.

First and the foremost, have you or your business organization ever thought about how secure your data to be stored in some storage space offered to you by your cloud service provider and located at some unseen data center? In other words, your cloud service provider may have its data distributed in several data centers established in various parts of the world. To which content do they provide a guarantee on the security of your data (maybe sensitive or maybe not) stored in such geographically parted locations? If you've ever thought about the data security, these questions would have naturally come up to your mind. To  address this concern, some cloud service providers are now in the process of offering encrypted data storage mechanisms restricting the room for any security vulnerabilities. But that too has got some bad implications like performance bottlenecks, etc which would reduce the performance and other measurements of the data manipulative processes associated with the business.

Another important concern would be, the various laws, rules and regulations and acts that are imposed upon data by different countries. For example, if your cloud service provider is based on some European country and if you, as the service consumer, are located at some Asian country, the variations of such laws imposed on data may restrict you from manipulating your own data freely according to your real requirements. Though this risk is not clearly visible, it can be of such high impact on the legality of your business.

For highly data intensive businesses, the high availability of data plays a vital role. Thus, for such businesses that have gotten themselves into the cloud must have a strong guarantee from the service provider that the high availability is constantly ensured. The recent power outages took place in Amazon, one of the popular service providers in the cloud space, is one of the best examples to show how risky it could be, if it's not handled properly. Most of the time this type of service interruptions due to Power outages, natural disasters, etc take place unexpectedly. Yet it is a must that the cloud service provider has the ability to mitigate such risks and provide the service consumers with an uninterrupted service. On the other hand, there should be a guarantee on the time that the service provider would  take in order to restore the system back to normal conditions. Not only that, in case of a natural disaster, the cloud service provider should have the ability to recover your data from any data loss that could possibly occur.

These would be somewhat obvious questions if you are really mindful about the data security. Yet, it is always important that all individuals and organizations who are into cloud, take them into account if they're to select the best suited cloud service provider for their business in terms of data.

Nowadays, most of the people who are dealing with sensitive data manipulative activities and concerned about data security, thus, prefer the concept of private cloud ahead of the services offered by the public cloud in which they can have the total control over each and every aspect of the data manipulations that are involved in their business activities. The good news is that, WSO2 offers its private cloud solutions (apart from its public cloud solutions) to help such people get going with their business who are doubtful about the data security, which enables the users to obtain the complete control over their data manipulative needs. Further, WSO2's private cloud offerings too expose you to its complete product stack as-Services including Data-as-a-Service, ESB-as-a-Service, etc. Visit wso2.org or wso2.com for more details, tutorials and articles which would provide you with a comprehensive understanding about WSO2's cloud offerings and how you can adapt them into your businesses.