Saas, Laas, and Paas security concerns

SaaS Security Concerns

SaaS are the most popular services offered in public clouds.

Because anyone can use a public cloud via the internet, this brings a wide range of concerns and risks, mostly related to data and access. Some of the most important ones are:

• The lack of ability to comply with regulatory compliances. For instance, the regulations in certain countries allow them to store confidential data collected from hospitalised patients to a public cloud. (We should note that big cloud providers started to address this issue. For instance, Microsoft has set up a protected government cloud level of service in Australia as have AWS for the US government).
• Lack of control on the security management of the public clouds.
• Higher probability of cyberattacks because of the exposure of cloud resources to the public via the Internet
• Higher probability insider data breaches. Public cloud providers normally have more staff to manage a large number of resources in the cloud. The more people working inside the cloud provider, the higher the probability of information theft and breaches.
• Difficulty tracking data transfer to and from the cloud resources.
• Lack of visibility of users, data access, and applications in the cloud provider.

PaaS & IaaS Security Concerns

The main security concerns when using PaaS and IaaS are:

• The lack of monitoring ability on a loud workload system and its applications
• Difficulty maintaining consistent security control across multiple clouds and platforms
• Higher probability of insider data breaches.
• Lack of data visibility in the cloud
• Lack of control on the users and access grants to the cloud
• Bypassing authentication and encryption
• Hacking and attacks
• Abusing cloud services