Wednesday 24 August 2016

Dirty Threats of the Cloud Services

Custom software development companies

Introduction

Custom software development companies are no more sitting on their hands, questioning if they should risk transferring applications and data to the cloud. They're undertaking it -- but security remains a thoughtful concern.

The shared, on-demand nature of cloud computing acquaint with the likelihood of new security breaches that can obliterate any gains made by the switch to cloud technology. Cloud services permit users to bypass software development company-wide security policies and implement their own books in the service of IT projects

The top cloud security threats are given as follows:

Data breaches

Cloud atmospheres face many of the same threats due to the huge amount of data stored on the cloud servers, providers become an attractive target. The brutality of potential damage depends on the exposure of data sensitivity.

When a data breach occurs, software development companies might incur charges, or they might face lawsuits or criminal charges leading to significant loss of data, brand image and money costs.
Compromised credentials and broken authentication

Data breaches and attacks often arises from lack of authentication, weak or poor passwords, and meager key or digital certificate management.Custom software development organizations frequently struggle with identity management as the organizations try to give permissions as per the user’s job role. More important, they occasionally forget to take away user access rights during job termination.

Majority of the developers make the error of setting in credentials and cryptographic keys in source code and keeping them in public-facing repositories. Keys need to be properly protected and rotated occasionally to make it tougher for attackers to use keys without authorization.

The software development organization need to understand the security measures the provider practices to protect the identity platform.

Hacked interfaces and APIs

Almost all cloud service and application offers APIs. In software development companies, IT teams use interfaces and APIs to interact with cloud services, as well as services that offer cloud provisioning, management, orchestration, and monitoring.

The safety and accessibility of cloud services from authentication to encryption depends on the security of the API. Risk grows with 3rd parties that depends on APIs and build on these interfaces, as organizations may need to expose additional IT services and credentials. Weak interfaces and APIs expose organizations to security issues related to confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability

Exploited system vulnerabilities

Organizational vulnerabilities, or vulnerable bugs in programs, are not novel, but they have become a greater problem with the introduction of multi-tenancy in cloud computing.Custom software development organizations share memory, databases, and other resources in close proximity to one another, creating new attack surfaces.

The expenses of mitigating system vulnerabilities are comparatively low compared to other IT expenditures. Change control processes that discourse reserve patching safeguard that remediation events are properly documented and revised by technical teams

Account hijacking

Phishing and software exploits are quiet successful, and cloud services complement a new dimension to the threat as attackers can eavesdrop on actions, operate transactions, and change data. Attackers might also use the cloud application to introduce many other attacks.

Collective Defense-in-depth protection approach encompass the damage incurred by the data breach. Software development Organizations must for bid the sharing of the credentials between different users and various services. Accounts should be tracked monitored to trace all the transactions. The key point is to safeguard credentials from being stolen.

DoS attacks

DoS attacks have gained prominence as a result of cloud computing as they majorly affect availability. The software systems slows down to a crawl or merely time out. There is nothing that can done about DOS attack except for the fact to sit and wait.

DoS attacks devour huge quantity of processing power. Software development organizations must be attentive of asymmetric, application-level DoS attacks, which goal Web server and database vulnerabilities.

Cloud providers incline to be better composed to lever DoS attacks than their customers. The key point is to have a plan to mitigate the outbreak before it occurs, so supervisors have access to various resources when they want them.

Conclusion:

While the scope of Cloud Computing is wide and comprises several new trends and IT Services, Software development companies in India are keeping pace with the latest or the emerging trends in IT. It has become essential and important for IT organizations to understand various service threats and take necessary action to avoid possible loss.

References :

http://www.infoworld.com/article/3041078/security/the-dirty-dozen-12-cloud-security-threats.html