Friday, April 24, 2020

Cybersecurity and Cloud Computing

You may remember back when we used computers on campus, all our work was stored in a centralized location. We shared applications that were stored, well, somewhere. There was very little that the machines we were using did. We logged on and worked on data that was somewhere else. Life was good. We just needed access to the terminals. Ah, the mainframe.

The cloud is essentially nothing more than a network of computers across the internet. We can access our data from anywhere we have connectivity. But what is connected is vulnerable.

Cloud service providers have made great strides in recent years to improve infrastructure security. However, the headlines show large data breaches from across all industry sectors, including those you would think are highly secure, suggesting there is still a lot of work to be done in securing cloud-based data.

Who is ultimately responsible for securing data? It is possible that moving to a cloud service provider may improve data security for some organizations. This must be taken into consideration along with access permissions to data stored on the cloud.

Managing access control for cloud-based data is an important function. As seen in the headlines, disgruntled employees have released sensitive information. The IT manager also needs to be aware of who has control of this process. They need to know if they will be able to modify access control or whether that is a function of the cloud service provider.

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