Tamara Kasson 7
Tamara Kasson
Professor Blessinger
English 101
April 19, 2016
Assessing the Risks of the Cloud
Imagine all your sensitive data such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, birth dates, or personal photographs compromised and distributed to the internet beyond your control. “The Fappening” occurred Labor Day weekend 2014, Ryan Collins uploaded countless celebrities’ personal photographs obtained via socially engineered phishing tactics from the ICloud and Gmail. The technological world today is booming and expanding the ways we can send and receive sensitive data. In the past few years, the news has often had reports of large-scale organizations falling victim to hackers obtaining customer and employee information. Sony, Home Depot, JP Morgan, and Anthem are all large-scale companies that lost sensitive data at the hands of hackers. Cloud computing has become a mainstream technology for storing data, but it is too fragile for the realm of cyber security presently; the Cloud is easily penetrable by hackers, a significant amount of the sensitive data within is unencrypted and lacks superiority over local storage.
Over the past several years, the concept of Cloud computing has gone from a mere idea to blossoming into one of the most buzzed about innovations in today’s technological world. Even folks who are not much in tune with technology want to have a peek at the Cloud revolution. In the past, people would have cell phones, pagers, palm pilots, and other mobile devices without data convergence. The Cloud provides the convergence of one’s data across multiple devices in lieu of updating new devices manually or with inconveniences. Whether you’re a singular user, small business, a large-scale company, or government entity, Cloud computing offers a means to manage computing resources. Computing resources are data related needs such as storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth (National Institute of Standards and Technology 2). The success in the unification of user’s data is reliant on the provider’s ability to adequately protect and store user data.
Cloud computing is a means to store or process user and business data on-demand via third-party data sites. In speaking with various IT professionals during research, a majority quickly referred to it as storing data on someone else’s computer and noted security as the primary concern in using the Cloud. The greatest threat to the ratification of Cloud computing is in securing it entirely. Realistically, could the cloud ever be one hundred percent secure? Possibly, but not presently. Cloud services defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology are explained in three sections, deployment models, service models, and essential characteristics. Private clouds, community louds, public clouds, and hybrid clouds are all deployment models in which cloud services can be delivered. Public Clouds are clouds in which the infrastructure is readily available to...
