Hi Dariusz

On the question of whether data is safe in the cloud, the short answer is 'it depends'. Which raises the issue of what does it depend on?

Lets start first with a couple of non-cloud examples - a small business and a large corporate. The small business could start with a single server, can use an online tutorial to set up a server instance and can get on with using their system to store their important company data. Easy? Yes. Secure? Very unlikely. This is because such tutorials are designed to provide an easy setup that anyone can handle, including non-IT people, which is very much likely to be the case for a small business. Unless one of the employees or owner happens to have cyber security skills on top of whatever they have been hired to do, the business will be unlikely to support its own IT department. The tutorial will provide a whole host of potentially useful software. But what it will not do is to show you how to setup a 'secure' system. Within seconds of going live, the attacks will start and it will not be long before these security weaknesses will be found, exploited and it will be 'game over'.

With a large corporate, they will likely have been in business for decades. They will have a large IT department who should be 'switched on' and understand what they have to do to be, and remain, secure. They will have extensive IT systems and will have been running these for years. They are therefore much more likely to have a decent level of security than smaller firms.

In each of the above examples, they will be constrained in the case of urgent urgent need for expansion of their systems, which is why many consider the use of cloud. This is because there will be limited knowledge in the case of the small firm, and in the case of large corporates, there will likely be a well controlled, rigorous process for acquiring and deploying new resources, sometimes taking as long as 6-9 months to effect. Whereas the ability for instant provisioning of resources allows for rapid provisioning to meet urgent business needs when cloud is used.

Let us now consider the 2 extremes of cloud service provider (CSP). We can have a small local CSP, and we can have a global giant such as Amazon. Deploying cloud is no different from conventional IT systems right? No, it is not. The way you deploy and install your software appears, on the face of it, to be exactly the same as in conventional systems, but it is not as simple as that. There is a huge background infrastructure on which your running cloud instance is based. As a cloud user, none of this is apparent to you. You simply flash the company credit card, choose a fully provisioned instance type, and five minutes later you are up and running.

All of this background infrastructure means that cloud is considerably more complex than conventional systems. While what you see can appear to be as straightforward as conventional IT system, what you get is way more complex. Complexity is not the friend of security. With a small CSP, there is more likelihood that many of the background functionality will be sub-contracted out to other providers. Even with large CSPs, these kinds of things happen. This means that you are actually sharing your 'secure' system with a range of different people. With the small CSP, they will likely retain all your data within their own data warehouse, situated in a single country. With the large CSP, your data may well be mirrored into other systems located in different continents, never mind different countries. This is often done to ensure continuity of provisioning. This can expose your data to a lot of different parties, far more than you might be comfortable with. It also exposes your company to different legal jurisdictions. You might be fully compliant with all the laws in your own country of operation, yet you could find yourself in breach of laws in a range of different countries, exposing you to potential arrest, large fines and even jail. CSPs might well have very strict vetting of all staff, but this is frequently not the case for job agency providers, who provide support to CSPs in the event of illness of their own staff.

So, coming back to the original question, how safe is your data? Please feel free to discuss.

Best regards

Bob

Hi Dariusz

On the question of whether data is safe in the cloud, the short answer is 'it depends'. Which raises the issue of what does it depend on?

Lets start first with a couple of non-cloud examples - a small business and a large corporate. The small business could start with a single server, can use an online tutorial to set up a server instance and can get on with using their system to store their important company data. Easy? Yes. Secure? Very unlikely. This is because such tutorials are designed to provide an easy setup that anyone can handle, including non-IT people, which is very much likely to be the case for a small business. Unless one of the employees or owner happens to have cyber security skills on top of whatever they have been hired to do, the business will be unlikely to support its own IT department. The tutorial will provide a whole host of potentially useful software. But what it will not do is to show you how to setup a 'secure' system. Within seconds of going live, the attacks will start and it will not be long before these security weaknesses will be found, exploited and it will be 'game over'.

With a large corporate, they will likely have been in business for decades. They will have a large IT department who should be 'switched on' and understand what they have to do to be, and remain, secure. They will have extensive IT systems and will have been running these for years. They are therefore much more likely to have a decent level of security than smaller firms.

In each of the above examples, they will be constrained in the case of urgent urgent need for expansion of their systems, which is why many consider the use of cloud. This is because there will be limited knowledge in the case of the small firm, and in the case of large corporates, there will likely be a well controlled, rigorous process for acquiring and deploying new resources, sometimes taking as long as 6-9 months to effect. Whereas the ability for instant provisioning of resources allows for rapid provisioning to meet urgent business needs when cloud is used.

Let us now consider the 2 extremes of cloud service provider (CSP). We can have a small local CSP, and we can have a global giant such as Amazon. Deploying cloud is no different from conventional IT systems right? No, it is not. The way you deploy and install your software appears, on the face of it, to be exactly the same as in conventional systems, but it is not as simple as that. There is a huge background infrastructure on which your running cloud instance is based. As a cloud user, none of this is apparent to you. You simply flash the company credit card, choose a fully provisioned instance type, and five minutes later you are up and running.

All of this background infrastructure means that cloud is considerably more complex than conventional systems. While what you see can appear to be as straightforward as conventional IT system, what you get is way more complex. Complexity is not the friend of security. With a small CSP, there is more likelihood that many of the background functionality will be sub-contracted out to other providers. Even with large CSPs, these kinds of things happen. This means that you are actually sharing your 'secure' system with a range of different people. With the small CSP, they will likely retain all your data within their own data warehouse, situated in a single country. With the large CSP, your data may well be mirrored into other systems located in different continents, never mind different countries. This is often done to ensure continuity of provisioning. This can expose your data to a lot of different parties, far more than you might be comfortable with. It also exposes your company to different legal jurisdictions. You might be fully compliant with all the laws in your own country of operation, yet you could find yourself in breach of laws in a range of different countries, exposing you to potential arrest, large fines and even jail. CSPs might well have very strict vetting of all staff, but this is frequently not the case for job agency providers, who provide support to CSPs in the event of illness of their own staff.

So, coming back to the original question, how safe is your data? Please feel free to discuss.

Best regards

Bob

It depends on the various things like nature of data, type of storage, type of data center and above-all, measures taken to protect data. It can not be answered straightforwardly 'yes' or 'no'.

Data stored in the cloud is nearly always stored in an encrypted form that would need to be cracked before an intruder could read the information. But as a scholar of cloud computing and cloud security, I’ve seen that where the keys to that encryption are held varies among cloud storage services. In addition, there are relatively simple ways users can boost their own data’s security beyond what’s built into systems they use.

Hello,

It depends what you mean by "to store" and by "safe".

Is the cloud the only one how you retain your data or is it one of more ways of storing? What kind of data is it?

Does "safe" mean that you do not want to lose data, or does it mean that nobody can access that?

Whatever answer on the question above is, it is always necessary to assess available scenarios, their advantages and their risks, incl. possibilities and costs to eliminate those risks.

Yet no researcher/scientists/company/organization/country claim with conviction about a foolproof Mechanism/Scheme for securing personal information/data. Also no one can say that their software/protocol/scheme etc shall given 100% guarantee for securing data else where, therefore, if some one store data in the cloud, might be safe, but there exist chance to access some unauthorized person by launching Sybil, eclipse and partition attacks on that.

Therefore, in the context of the above considerations, the following important question appears:

How should Big Data database systems be protected against the activities of cybercriminals?

Currently, various data security tools are used in Big Data database systems. The basic principle is the parallel use of several types of IT security and compliance with specific procedures for analyzing and securing systems against potential materialization of operational risks, including technical risks associated with used computer hardware and specific database technologies and personnel risks associated with employees who support these systems.

The key issue is also whether built database systems are directly connected to the Internet online or are not permanently connected to the Internet and certain data from the Internet are added from time to time to Big Data databases after their analysis by anti-virus software, detecting malware worms, such as keyloggers and other malicious software created by cybercriminals and used to steal information from database systems of data warehouses and Big Data.

In a situation when Big Data database systems or other systems where important information is collected are connected to the Internet online, then the information sent should be encrypted, and system gateways connecting the Big Data database with the Internet should be equipped with a good firewall and other filtering security incoming information. If the employees operating the Big Data database system use certain e-mailboxes, they should be only company mailboxes and verified from the security side of data transfer on the Internet. The company should have strict security procedures for using e-mail boxes, because in recent years via e-mails cybercriminals have sent ransomware programs hidden in e-mail attachments, used to encrypt hard disks used in company and server databases.

Do you agree with me on the above matter?

In the context of the above issues, I am asking you the following question:

How should Big Data database systems be protected against the activities of cybercriminals? What types of programs and systems for securing Big Data databases against cybercrime are currently used? What other types of security instruments for Big Data database systems are currently used?

Please reply

I invite you to the discussion

Thank you very much

Best wishes

I guess it has sence if u pack u info into encripted archives within a cloud. Double security is better in any way

Absolutely not. Those who think so, living in heaven of fools.

I think not

Yes, I agree with the above opinions. I also think that information stored in the cloud is not 100 percent. safe. Providers of cloud storage services, despite their assurances with a high level of security, are not able to retain complete information security. There have been cases of intrusions into databases in the cloud made by hackers who stole sensitive and personal data from clients of these Internet services. In some cases, data necessary to log into social media portals and other systems and Internet information services were also stolen.

Though it is good idea to store in cloud, but surely itbis not completely safe. Many cases it may be hacked, can be stolen. Sometime in very critical moment, when we need those data very much may not be available immediately due to internet or other problem.

Cloud security is tight, but it's not infallible. ... But the bigger risk with cloud storage is privacy. Even if data isn't stolen or published, it can still be viewed. Governments can legally request information stored in the cloud, and it's up to the cloud services provider to deny access.

Security is high on it ,but few agencies can take access of it .

I think not

Not allways

Keeping data on cloud is not actually secure at all. Many types of potential security issues can threat cloud ecosystems: such as denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, data privacy due to untrusted cloud providers, system integrity, lack of visibility to data, inability to control data, or theft of data.

Security is critical in cloud-based applications, such as Internet of Things. Details can be referred to our very recent survey paper. In this paper, we review security issues/ weaknesses remaining in cloud systems. Specially, we propose to use blockchain, a disruptive technology nowadays to solve critical security problems in cloud computing. We also provide a comprehensive overview on the latest advances in cloud computing concept, architecture and security mechanism. Specially, we also update the recent cloud -blockchain platforms which are very useful to security applications and industry solutions. Hope that it is useful to you and researchers. Cheers! Preprint Integration of Blockchain and Cloud of Things: Architecture,...

Despite all the precautions taken by the actors of Cloud Computing, there are cases of data loss. Only the most expensive offers include data replication across multiple servers. For the most affordable offers, the data is stored on a single server, fallible in case of failure.