The public cloud is becoming a popular option for many organizations. And the usage is no longer limited to non-critical business applications. Many companies are now moving to public cloud even their mission-critical operations.
Many enterprises have recognized the benefits of the public cloud. The list includes cost savings, easy deployment, and great flexibility and scalability.
What about the concerns that made several organizations reluctant in moving to the public cloud?
Let’s dig deeper the perceived risks of public cloud computing which slows its adoption, and how you can handle them.
- Security
This issue always tops the list of concerns in adopting public cloud. Many organizations are cautious about moving their data from their secured on-premise environment to the public cloud, thinking that they will lose data security.
As such, they come up with some security policies to protect their data, hoping to extend the enforcement of those policies to the cloud. However, several cloud providers cannot commit to data governance and solid security procedures, leaving this issue unresolved.
It becomes crucial that you fully evaluate the security practices of your potential cloud service provider. You have to check that the security provisions are adequate to manage and mitigate risks. While it is the provider’s responsibility to safeguard the security and integrity of your data and applications, you have to ensure that there are no gaps between what was agreed and the actual service they will deliver.
- Data protection
The cloud data lifecycle comprises of three phases: at rest, in transit, and in use. As a smart organization, you need to focus on safeguarding the entire data lifecycle. However, of all these three phases, it is the data in use that is the most vulnerable. It’s because other providers do not usually apply procedures to protect the data in this phase. Hence, attackers specifically target the data in use. It is important to review how the cloud service provider mitigates this risk.
- Shared access
Public computing follows the multitenancy model. In this case, multiple customers share the same computing resources such as CPU, memory, storage, and physical building.
Because of this setup, many enterprises are wary of potential data leaks and other new types of vulnerabilities that come with using shared resources.
When choosing your potential provider, pick the one with strict security measures for data protection and integrity.
- Availability
In the public cloud, redundancy depends solely on your service provider. We have read many stories of companies whose systems went down for hours or days. They did not only experience service interruptions; there were also instances when some of them lost their data.
It is wise to choose a cloud provider that has data redundancy feature, such as triple data mirroring, to protect your data from disk failures and malicious attacks.
- Regulatory compliance
There are several data compliance regulations that you must adhere to when it comes to handling sensitive data specifically those involving the public cloud environment. To protect your business, you must carefully review if your provider meets all the guidelines set by the regulators.
Cloud computing has far more advantages than the perceived risks. Oracle is one cloud service provider that has many security measures and policies in place to mitigate risks. To fully understand how you can benefit from public cloud computing, contact Four Cornerstone now! Our Oracle Consulting in Dallas can provide valuable insights on any concerns that are pulling you back to embracing the public cloud.
Photo by B Rosen.
