The all-embracing cultures: WFH, e-learning and online games, are giving every cloud an unprecedented stress test.
Over the past few weeks and months, the COVID-19 has emerged as a global challenge and has disrupted almost all aspects of life. Early on, several proactive measures like lockdown, travel restrictions and no mass gathering were introduced to contain the spread and severity of the virus. Many organizations responded to COVID-19 lockdown by making their employees to work from home. TCS has asked most of its employees to permanently work remotely even after the lockdown is over.
In-order to make work from home feasible, companies depend on cloud services as the work done remotely over the internet can be accessed globally from the internet. But there are threatening cloud computing security issues that can compromise company’s data and is a real concern for the organizations.
Public Cloud Capacity Issues
The lockdown orders, implementation of work-from-home, and adoption of cloud services all happened like a chain reaction with COVID-19 acting as the disruptive catalyst, accelerating the reaction. This increase in demand for cloud usage caused capacity problems for the providers.
Microsoft Azure cited 775% increase in user traffic in areas with strict lockdown and is facing capacity issues in small regions of the US.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) claims to have handled the rise in demand for cloud services effectively.
Increasing the cloud capacity is hard especially at these lockdown times, albeit it is believed that the cloud providers are adding more capacity. Data stored in cloud are stored in physical server racks in data centers. So, adding more capacity in cloud for your data means adding more server racks, which requires manufacturing new electronic equipment, that may not be possible with the manufacturing facilities being shutdown (non-essential business).
Cloud storage breached
The swift transition to 100% distributed cloud engineering teams and the use of remote access policies, devices and networks could leave some security gaps including cloud misconfiguration. From the survey conducted by Fugue, it is found that 73 percent of cloud users experienced more than 10 cloud misconfiguration incidents per day, 36 percent citing more than 100 per day, and 10 percent experiencing more than 500 per day. The majority, 73 percent, used manual log analysis and remediation tools to identify problems, still human error can also lead to misconfigurations.
Clearly, automated advanced threat protection is more crucial than ever for companies who rely on cloud.
It is better to use enterprise-level cloud storage though it is costly, but it’s worth protecting the company’s data. And it is a fact that, cloud is not more inherently safe as compared to the physical network onsite.
