The cloud lets users store information on the internet and access it from various devices. But who owns the cloud? Simply put, the cloud is a collection of servers in huge complexes, owned by the world’s largest corporations. It means our data sits on computers we can’t access. Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple have invested heavily in creating homes for our data.
This post covers common data privacy risks in cloud computing.
Who Owns the Cloud?
Investing in cloud services helps avoid the costs of buying, housing, and managing IT hardware and software. It lets a specialized company handle your data.
Cloud technology is so widespread that we often don’t realize how we use it daily. From the pictures stored in your smartphone to your search engine history, chances are, everything is getting stored in the cloud.
With the growing demand for cloud services, companies like Microsoft and Amazon invest in advanced infrastructure to offer rich and evolving cloud services. As a result, AWS holds 32% of the market with over 1.3 million servers, while Microsoft Azure serves 19% of cloud users with four million servers.
Modern businesses use cloud services to handle data and applications, allowing them to focus on their core activities. But do they know where their data is stored and what control they have over it?
Cloud services let you scale your IT resources and save money. However, you often cannot know the exact location of your data stored in global data centers. So, who owns your data in the cloud?
You own the data and files you create. But when you use a cloud service, you hand it to the provider, who then controls it. They ensure your applications, software, and data follow standard regulations. And the vendors can also hand over your data to the legal authorities if asked.
These policies and the ease of access to cloud services lead to some data security concerns.
Common Data Privacy and Security Risks in the Cloud
Cloud computing technologies are continually evolving the techniques they use to handle data/software/web-app storage, sharing, hosting, and more.
The cloud offers better flexibility, cost savings, and increased productivity. It supports innovation and remote work. However, hosting important data on an exposed server is more prone to breaches and cyber threats.
Compliance Violation
For a business like healthcare or finance organisation, complying with legal regulations is a must. Cloud resources are easily accessible over the internet, meaning hosting your mission-critical data on a cloud platform, you will face more complications in tracking who is accessing your data.
The easy access to large-scale data makes it hard for businesses to comply with regulations.
Data Breaches
Another potential data risk with cloud services is data breaches. If scammers can somehow breach the cloud system or a device connected to it, they can access or distribute your sensitive data/files like PII (Personal Identification Information), PHI (Personal Health Information).
Transferring and storing your data over the internet increases the risk of cyber threats like data breaches.
Failure in Data Separation Leads to Data Theft
In a public cloud, if a platform fails to isolate user data due to a vulnerability, it can lead to a breach. One user could access another user’s data. Ineffective traffic and bandwidth isolation make the public cloud more vulnerable. Thus malicious users may attack co-users in the same cloud data center, and current measures to control unauthorized access are insufficient to scale this multi-tenancy scheme.
Data Loss
Data loss is another common security issue for cloud users. Attackers can hack your system or erase your business data. You can lose data due to system disruption, malware, or hacking if backups are lost or there is no disaster recovery. Attackers often target both the data and its backups.
Cloud Security: A Shared Approach
Businesses often spread their workloads across private, public, and SaaS clouds for better agility. A shared security approach is essential.
Here’s how a shared approach improves cloud security:
This shared approach has a formal name and a well-defined structure that every organization operating in the cloud should understand. The cloud shared responsibility model framework maps out precisely which security obligations fall to your provider and which remain firmly in your hands — covering everything from physical infrastructure and hypervisor security on the provider’s side to data classification, access controls, and endpoint protection on yours. Knowing exactly where that boundary sits is the first step toward building a security strategy that leaves no critical gaps unaddressed.
- Private Cloud: As the private cloud is hosted in a company’s on-premises server and solely dedicated to that user, the company is entirely responsible for the system security. In this cloud model, the users own the data, and they solely control the IT infrastructure: virtual and physical servers, firewalls, access, hypervisor, and more.
- Public Cloud: In this model, though the third-party cloud service provider possesses the cloud system (physical server, infrastructure, and hypervisor) and controls it, the end-users control the virtual network, applications, and who can access their system.
- SaaS: The cloud providers are primarily accountable for protecting the network, applications, cloud infrastructure, and physical servers. The end-users own their data and are responsible for ensuring data protection and risk mitigation.
Cloud service providers must ensure system security, but users should also use quality tools to address security gaps.
To ensure your data is protected, a cloud security solution must offer:
- Better visibility for SaaS applications
- Risk and compliance violation analytics
- Real-time threat detection and malware blocking
Now you should have a better understanding of who owns the cloud and how your data is stored and secured.
