Today, most users perceive the cloud as safe online software and operating environments, online backup, storage, and file-sharing systems. From Chrome OS, Google’s App Engine, to iCloud, users rely on these systems in today’s technological age, basking in its various resourceful benefits including capabilities for predicting and reacting to adverse events, lowering the possibilities of data loss and outages, reducing the in-house processing power requirements, and fulfilling users’ increasing data access needs. However, with its innumerable benefits, as Dr. Arun Vishwanath, New York, opines, cloud computing solutions also bring new technical challenges, inducing vulnerability to cyber attacks, that must be regulated.
For instance, cloud-based data sharing normalizes the exchange of hyperlinks through emails, increasing the possibility of us clicking on malicious hyperlinks, with little information in the email for us to judge the authenticity of what’s being shared. The market space is made up of hundreds of providers, where each organization has at least five different cloud services with users subscribing to an ecosystem of their own liking, resulting in infinite cloud-service generated hyperlinks. Such a traffic of hyperlinks reduces our discernment of it in the midst of chaos and confusion. In most cases, the mail doesn’t even come from their actual in-box for us to trace back and affirm its security. The very graphics of the email, with the “Open”/“Download” boxes magnified, are designed to fasten our decision-making process to click on it. Users cannot even plug the hyperlink in a search engine or privately send it to others, so the only way for them to know what’s in it is to open it. Lack of personalization-a subject line, a salutation, even a message-makes it even more easy to create spoofed cloud sharing emails.
The irony remains, as Dr. Arun Vishwanath of New York unveils, that the success of the cloud is the root cause behind these technical challenges. Increase in usage and widespread adoption of the cloud will only contribute to instigating even larger issues.
For further detailed information on securing data in the cloud, please click on
https://www.arunvishwanath.us/2020/09/15/data-security-in-the-cloud-part-1/