A private cloud involves the power of computing on-demand, at the user's discretion, and complete freedom to develop a technical solution capable of meeting the specific needs of your applications.
A private cloud allows you to move away from being at the mercy of vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure and maintain your freedom of action, such as storing data locally and efficiently managing compliance.
However, private clouds present their own challenges. Adopting a private cloud exposes your organization to certain security risks, which are sometimes not well understood.
List of Private Cloud-based Security Risks That You Need to be Aware of
Hardware problems happen. Even in high availability environments, sporadically you may encounter an interruption in the contracted cloud services.
Server failures, human errors, malware, intrusions, or hardware/software updates can always cause unforeseen collateral damage.
Some cloud storage services have additional security features that can be contracted to prevent data loss, but interruptions can happen at any time, even in IT infrastructures with no prior history of problems.
The majority of companies that use the cloud think that protecting their data is the responsibility of their cloud providers.
However, this is not the case, cloud service providers only cover the security of the cloud itself, but do not protect customer data, nor the use of their infrastructure and platforms by customers.
Companies are thus faced with the need to take charge of the security of their data, and possibly that of their customers, in the cloud.
Controlling data in the cloud also depends on the ability of organizations to control who can access it.
Most threats to data hosted in the cloud come from compromised and internal accounts.
The employees, business partners, and contractors you trust can be some of your potential security risks.
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Whether in your IT infrastructure or when hiring any cloud service, unforeseen events will always be part of everyday life.
With private cloud solutions hosted in-house, IT needs to take responsibility and manage the private cloud. For external solutions, private cloud offerings are generally more expensive than a public cloud.
An internal expertise resource is needed for handling deployment over a private cloud.
If not available within the organization, it is unable to control it and therefore to secure as well. The consequences can be manifold.
Conditions for managing compliance & regulations via on-premise hardware are usually more distinct than in the cloud.
Nevertheless, it requires a considerable amount of time and is also costly to do so. Therefore, forcing a company to hire a team that’s well aware of compliance and regulations.
The backup plan is supposed to complement the data plan by providing security and integrity.
In fact, with no backup plan, the person in charge of the data will not be in control of the security and verification of the data infrastructure.
The consequences can be data loss or the inability to protect cloud-based data and applications.
Make sure that your cloud provider offers adequate security controls, and that their backup plan is adequate.
Improper configuration is always a security risk as it can put make the cloud vulnerable against various attacks.
This can cause data to be publicly exposed, manipulated, or even deleted.
The business's outcomes may vary depending on the nature of the misconfiguration, especially the pace with which it is detected.
Concluding Words
As can be seen, most of these issues are either commercial or legal and most of them involve risk management.
A major loss of service, such as data center failure, security breach, or other disruption, or even reduced performance, can create serious problems for the end-user.
You may also like to read: Things to Know About Private Cloud Architecture
