One of the factors that has prevented some businesses and government bodies from migrating data to the Cloud is security. If your data and files reside on a server in a remote data centre and are permanently online, can you really consider them to be completely secure? Isn’t it much easier for hackers to steal sensitive information if it’s stored on a server constantly connected to the Internet and what’s to stop data centre staff from accessing your files internally? Whilst these are valid concerns, they have been addressed by cloud service providers, making cloud storage as secure, if not more so, than any other comparable storage options.
How cloud storage providers ensure that your data is secure
All reputable cloud storage providers, and that includes those that also provide cloud hosting in Australia, have implemented robust security measures to safeguard the files and data entrusted to them. However, if you are looking for the most secure solution available, a commercial service such as Amazon S3 is the best option for storing important data. Amazon S3 provides users with a selection of advanced security tools to help them protect valuable information in the Cloud. Listed below are the most important ways in which Amazon Web Services (AWS) helps you to protect your data in the Cloud.
- Blocking public access — One of the simplest and most effective security tools you will find in Amazon S3, which is AWS’s data storage service, is the one that provides you with the ability to block public access to your data. With this, you can block public access to every data bucket in your account, including any that you may create in the future.
- Identity and access management — When you create new data buckets, objects and related resources in S3, you will notice that they are marked as private by default. Only you, as the creator of the resources, can access them. You can of course grant access to other users, with the advanced IAM features that AWS provides, giving you complete control over who is able to see the data that you store in the Cloud.
- Data encryption — With Amazon S3, you also get both client and server-side encryption for your data uploads, helping to keep it safe during transfers. You can easily check the encryption status of all data objects from the management console at any time.
- Checksum algorithms — To verify the integrity of data that is transferred to or from your Amazon S3 storage, you can use any of the four different types of checksum algorithms that the platform supports.
- Object Ownership — Any access control lists that you create for your data can quickly be overridden with the Object Ownership tool. The ‘Bucket owner enforced’ setting immediately restricts access to the data bucket in question, regardless of any other permissions that may have been granted.
This is just one example of how commercial cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS) in this case – help organisations to secure their data. Other reputable providers, such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, offer similar security tools to their customers.