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4 of the top cloud security techniques

Cloud security is paramount to digital transformation. This article lists the four top cloud security techniques.

What is IT security?

Cloud security is very similar to traditional IT security.

It includes a wide range of preventive, detective, and corrective methods and activities to make the resources in the cloud secure. There are many cloud security techniques.

Below we discuss some of these techniques.

1. Authentication

Authentication software is mostly responsible for the eligibility of a person or computer to gain access to the resources in the cloud. We can do this physically or digitally. Some popular tools and methods to authenticate a person physically are access cards, fingerprint, retina scanning, access key, etc. We can do digital authentication using credentials, which is usually a password. Other tools here are captcha, patterns, audio recognition, etc. The aim of these is to ensure that an authorised person gets access to critical information in the cloud.

2. Encryption

Encryption refers to the process of encoding data into a non-recognisable format. Therefore, if hackers get access to the data, they need the encryption key to decrypt data. If the cloud does not provide such services when uploading files, they can do this using third-party applications. One of the most recent technologies here is cloud cryptography. In this method, Quantum Direct key system is used to add another security layer for whoever requires access to the resources in the cloud.

3. Integrity

Data integrity ensures that data represents what we expect it to represent. One of the most widely used methods to ensure data integrity is to use ALOCA:

  • Attributable: Any data generated and stored should be linked to the person or people who create or collect them. We can do this using digital signatures.
  • Legible: This shows that data should be readable and permanent.
  • Contemporaneous: We should record the date and time of creating data.
  • Original: We create and store each data at a point in time. To consider and label data as original, it must be the first instance of the data.
  • Accurate: Data should be error-free, accurate, and complete.

4. Attack Solutions

There are many types of attacks in a cloud. Some of them are ransomware attacks, denial of service attacks, malware injection attacks, side-channel attacks, authentication attacks, phishing attacks, man-in-the-cloud attacks, etc.

We can detect and prevent attacks using a variety of methods including checking excess bandwidth, regular system checks, using an intrusion detection system, using a firewall, and blocking malicious IP addresses. To prevent some of these attacks, we can disable some port numbers in the cloud (e.g. port 22), install the most recent anti-viruses, and we can use a firewall to bounce the attack, and so on.

© Torrens University
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