Why cloud security requires multiple layers

Grazed from USA Today. Author: Rajiv Gupta.

The digital universe containing our photos, videos, movies, banking data, health data, tax statements and more is doubling roughly every two years. Securing this data is a concern. The proportion of sensitive data in the digital universe that requires protection is growing faster than the universe itself. What’s more, by 2020 nearly 40% of the information in the digital universe will be touched by cloud computing providers.

As we collectively put more and more business as well as personal data in the cloud, we expect cloud providers to fully secure the data. However, that’s rarely the case today. Hardly a day goes by without headlines about another significant data breach. Cloud providers must adopt a defense-in-depth strategy for data security. This means using layers of security technologies and business practices to make sure that data is protected in multiple ways. A good cloud security plan starts with data encryption but certainly doesn’t end there. In fact, there are five keys to cloud data security…

The first tactic that IT security professionals deploy is data encryption, which uses mathematical algorithms to hide the real values of the data. If the data is stolen, it is meaningless without access to the algorithm, or key, to unlock it. Encryption is a tried-and-true technology that can be used on structured data (e.g., numbers) as well as unstructured data (e.g., text). Today’s encryption schemes can preserve the format of the data and maintain critical user functionality like searching and sorting within applications…

Read more from the source @ http://www.usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/11/25/why-cloud-security-requires-multiple-layers/3683171/