Editor's note: What are the best practices in moving data to the clouds? Learn more here!



Many companies would like to take advantage of cloud computing, but concerns about possible security breaches and loss of data hold them back. For cloud computing to gain traction in the enterprise, IT and security executives need to be certain that their company's applications and data are safe. But when security is partly out of enterprise control, it becomes impossible to know if sensitive information has been accessed or compromised.

Security issues associated with third-party cloud environments continue to prevent organizations from taking advantage of the cost savings and flexibility that the cloud can offer. Today, using a public cloud means moving from an internal environment where a company has complete control of data and processes to an environment where that control belongs to someone else, and is often opaque. Within the cloud, applications run in a multi-tenant environment sharing virtual machines with other customers. Companies considering moving an application to a cloud have legitimate concerns about data being compromised or stolen, including unauthorized access by cloud administrators, exposure in the Internet or rogue employees using the cloud to corrupt or leak sensitive information.

One solution is to keep sensitive data within the corporate data center and put the other application tiers in the public cloud. While this approach works well for some use case scenarios, the latency impact of the "reach back" into the data center can be unacceptable for many applications and users. Moving the entire application to the cloud -- including the database tier -- provides better performance and scalability, but this exposes the application to new potential threats such as those mentioned above.

Encryption is a well-known approach to addressing these types of security concerns. For protection in the cloud, the enterprise needs to encrypt all data and communications. While encrypting the application in the initial environment is usually fairly straightforward, extending that encryption to the cloud creates new security issues that have blocked many cloud deployments. In order to run the application in the cloud, the enterprise needs to deliver the encryption keys to the cloud to decrypt the data. This creates additional risks by exposing the keys in the operating environment. In the worst case, poor encryption configuration and management can expose the corporate data center to threats from the cloud.

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