In a modern economy, it’s understandable that businesses should take advantage of the most up-to-date and effective solutions. When it comes to technology choices, maintaining flexibility and scalability is important for growth. Regardless of industry, cloud computing allows businesses and organizations to stay agile and poised for the next level.
But with such advancement comes risks that business owners and leaders should be aware of. In particular, cloud computing is an important digital strategy that can introduce several known security risks. With careful attention, these risks can be reduced or mitigated.
In this post, we’ll recap what cloud computing is and help business owners discover the potential security risks that cloud-based activity could introduce.
What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is a complex but popular way to manage, store, and house data on a third-party cloud application or platform. Well-known and recognizable cloud platforms include Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Drive.
Cloud computing provides remote access to workers and employees regardless of the physical location of the individual. With the cloud, a company’s data is stored and managed on external resources.
With this process, businesses aren’t required to maintain on-site data storage and computing power. This allows more freedom to use and distribute internal resources in different ways.
Security Risks of Cloud Computing
Despite many benefits, there are a few cloud computing security challenges to confront in the modern workplace. These threats can take place on both a small and large scale, which means that businesses must be proactive in order to reduce liability.
Although new cybersecurity risks can enter the scene at any time, the ones below are most prominent for businesses that operate using cloud platforms.
Data Breach or Compromise
A data breach takes place when a malicious outside party or threat actor compromises an organization’s security protocols. Usually, this is done in order to access the internal or confidential data that a company keeps within a protected cloud platform.
Data breaches are carried out as a form of cybersecurity attack. Companies are often targeted for a specific purpose or because the party responsible for the breach wants to gain leverage to that organization’s data in order to make some type of gain. Many times, the purpose is financial in nature.
The cybersecurity risk here is heightened when a single cloud attack exposes multiple companies that all host data on the same public cloud.
