Tag Archive

Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as "cloud storage"

Immunize Customer Experience With These Cloud Storage Security Practices

Cloud Storage, a Great ChoiceA 21st-century industry looking for uncompromising scalability and performance cannot possibly come across Cloud Storage and say, “I’ll pass.” Be it fintech or healthcare, small-sized customers, or multi-national clients; cloud storage is there to store and protect all business sensitive data for all business use cases. While modern services like smart data lakes, automated data backup and restore, mobility, and IoT revamp the customer experience, cloud storage would ensure impeccable infrastructure for data configuration, management, and durability. Any enterprise working with cloud storage is guaranteed to enjoy:Optimized Storage CostsMinimized Operational OverheadContinuous MonitoringLatency-Based Data TieringAutomated Data Backup, Archival & RestoreThroughput Intensive Storage AndSmart Workload ManagementHowever, such benefits come with a pre-requisite priority for the security of the cloud storage infrastructure. The data center and the network it operates in need to be highly secured from internal and external mishaps. Therefore, in this blog, we will discuss the various practices which would help you ensure the security of your cloud storage infrastructure. For a more technical sense of these practices, we will talk about one of the most popular cloud storage services – Amazon S3. However, the discussion around practices will be more generic to ensure that you can use them for any cloud storage vendor of your choice.Comprehending Cloud Storage SecurityA recent study suggests that 93% of companies are concerned about the security risks associated with the cloud. The technical architects and admins directly in contact with cloud storage solutions often face security issues that they don’t fully comprehend. With an increasing number of ransomware and phishing attacks, the organization might often find themselves skeptical about migrating the data. So, how does one overcome these doubts and work towards a secure, business-boosting storage infrastructure? The answer, actually, is two-part:External Security – The security of the storage infrastructure itself is more of a vendor’s job. For instance, in the case of Amazon S3, AWS takes the onus of protecting the infrastructure that you trust your data with. Managing the cloud storage infrastructure makes sense for the vendor to carry out regular tests, audit, and verify the security firewalls of the cloud. Moreover, a lot of data compliance issues rightly fall under the vendor’s scope of responsibility so that you don’t have to worry about the administrative regulations for your data storage.Internal Security – Ensuring the security from the inside is where you, as a cloud storage service consumer, share the responsibility. Based on the services you’ve employed from your cloud storage vendor, you are expected to be fully aware of the sensitivity of your data, the compliance regulations of your organization, and the regulations mandatory as per the local authorities in your geography. The reason behind these responsibilities is the control you get as a consumer over the data that goes into the cloud storage. While the vendor would provide you with a range of security tools and services, it should be your final choice that would align with the sensitivity of your business data.Thus, in this blog, we will discuss all the security services and configurations you can demand from your vendor to ensure that cloud storage is an ally against your competition and not another headache for your business.Confirm Data DurabilityThe durability of infrastructure should be among the first pre-requisites for storing mission-critical data on the cloud. Redundant storage of data objects across multiple devices ensures reliable data protection. Amazon S3, for that matter, uses its PUT and PUTObject operations to copy the data objects at multiple facilities simultaneously. These facilities are then vigilantly monitored for any loss so that immediate repairs can be arranged. Some of the important practices to ensure data durability are:Versioning – Ensure that the data objects are versioned. This will allow recovering older data objects in the face of any internal or external application failure.Role-Based Access – Setting up individual accounts for each user with rightful liberties and restrictions discourages data leakage due to unnecessary access.Encryption – Server-side and in-transit data encryption modules provide an additional layer of protection, assuring that the data objects aren’t harmed during business operations. Amazon S3, for instance, uses Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 validated cryptographic modules for such purpose.Machine Learning – Cloud Storage vendors also offer machine learning-based data protection modules that recognize the business sensitivity of data objects and alert the storage admins about unencrypted data, unnecessary access, and shared sensitive data objects. Amazon Macie is one such tool offered by AWS.Making the Data UnreadableThe in-transit data (going in and out of the cloud storage data centers) is vulnerable to network-based attacks. Measures need to be taken to ensure that this data, even if breached, is of no use to the attacker. The best method to achieve this is Data Encryption. Encryption modules like SSL/TLS are available to make sure that the data is unreadable without proper decryption keys. The cloud storage vendors provide server-side and client-side encryption strategies for the same purpose. In the case of Amazon S3, the objects can be encrypted when they are stored and decrypted back when they are downloaded. You, as a client, can manage the encryption keys and choose the suitable tools for your requirements.Managing the Traffic MischiefWhile the traffic on the public network is vulnerable to data thievery, the private network might often fall prey to internal mismanagement. To avoid both cases, most cloud vendors offer security sensitive APIs. These help the application operate with transport layer security while working with cloud storage data. TLS1.2 or above are usually recommended for modern data storage infrastructures, including the cloud. Talking about Amazon S3 in particular, AWS offers VPN and private link connections like Site-to-site and Direct connect to support safe connectivity for on-premise networks. To connect with other resources in the region, S3 uses a Virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoint that ensures that the requests are limited to and from the Amazon S3 bucket and VPC cloud.SSL cipher suites provide the guidelines for secure network operations. A category of such cipher suites supports what is known as Perfect Forward Secrecy – which essentially makes sure that the encryption and decryption keys are regularly changed. As a client, you should look for cloud storage service providers that support such suites in order to ensure a secure network. Amazon S3, for this purpose, uses DHE (Diffie-Hellman Ephermal) or ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephermal. Both are highly recommended suites supported by any application running on modern programming paradigms.Ask Before AccessAdmins handling cloud storage operations should follow strict access policies for resource access control. Both the resource and user-based access policies are offered by the cloud storage provider for the organization to choose from. It is imperative that you choose the right combination of these policies so that the permissions to your cloud storage infrastructure are tightly defined. A handy ally for this purpose in the case of Amazon S3 is an Access control list (ACL) where the access policies are defined for the S3 bucket, and you can easily choose the combo of your choice.Watchful MonitoringMaintain reliability, guaranteed availability, and untroubled performance are all results of a dark knight level monitoring. For cloud storage, you need a centralized monitoring dashboard of sorts that provides multi-point monitoring data. Check if your cloud vendor provides tools for:Automated single metric monitoring – Monitoring system that takes care of a specific metric and immediately flags any deviations from the expected resultsRequest Trailing – Request triggered by any user or service needs to be trailed for details like request source IP, request time, etc., to log the actions taken on the cloud storage data. Server access requests are also logged for this purpose.Security Incident Logging – Fault tolerance can only be strengthened if any and every misconduct is logged with associated metrics and the resolutions assigned for the purpose. Such logs also help for automated recommendations for future conducts related to cloud storage.ConclusionThere’ve been multiple episodes where companies serving high-profile customer-base faced humiliating attacks that went undetected over a considerable period of time. Such security gaps are not at all conducive to the customer experience we aim to serve. The security practices mentioned above will ensure that fragile corners of your cloud storage are all cemented and toughened up against the looming threats of ransomware and phishing hacks.

Aziro Marketing

cloud storage Cloud Storage Security storage

It’s CLOUDy out there!

“Cloud” or “Cloud Computing” has remained a buzz in the technology space for the last decade or so. But for a layman, what exactly does it mean? How does it affect or benefit us or any organization for that matter? What is the future like when it comes to the cloud?Also most importantly is it really worth all the hype?Let’s try to look into and answer as many concepts as possible here.Cloud Philosophy – Simplified:Firstly, to understand the cloud, we can take a simple example to relate to:Every family needs milk at home. The quantity of the milk needed per family may vary but is more or less constant for each of the family every day or on an average in a week. Now there could be scenarios or situations where one might have some guests visiting or some festivals in which the milk consumption may rise. Also, there could be scenarios where the family goes for a vacation, or some members of the family are out of time due to any reason during which the milk consumption for those many days would decrease. What does the family do during such days of upward spikes or a drop in requirement? They simply buy less milk or ask the milk vendor to deliver only the required quantity for the specified duration.So, the question here is “Would you by the cow, for your intermittently fluctuating milk requirements?” The answer is No!Now just to explain, consider the cow being “the cloud” which instead of milk gives us “resources” to order in the right quantity based on our needs at the given period. Simple, isn’t it? So we don’t spend huge amounts of our money in the infrastructure (cow). We can pay as per the use for the resources (milk) quite literally ‘milking’ the benefits of the cloud (cow).We all use the cloud:What if I told you that all of us used the Cloud even before we knew about it? Yes, we do.Consider you have word file saved on your desktop at the office and you need to access that file at home for further modification. Can you really just open up your computer at home and start working on the file? No, because that would be saved on your office computer hard-drive and you would have to either email it to yourself so that you can download it home for use or you would have to carry it in some pen drive.Now consider you were working on the same word file on some third party platform such as the Google Docs in your G-Drive. All you had to do was have an internet connection at home and sign-in into the G-Drive using the same account! That’s it.Basically, you accessed the Google Cloud where they had saved your file on their server. Same happens when you access your emails. Be it Google, Yahoo or Microsoft emails; these are never on ‘a particular computer’ but on the cloud or server. This makes it possible for us to log into any machine and simply check emails by signing in with our username and password. Cloud was never an alien concept; it’s just that it is more commercialized now and smaller businesses and startups who aren’t financially strong to have the infrastructure are now moving ahead to reap its benefits.Top Players in the Cloud :Now there are many organizations who have joined the ‘cloud party’ but the top contributors as per the latest 2018 survey are AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, Google & IBM. The following chart shows the market share of each of the player and how they compete with each other in terms of market adoption, Year on Year growth and footprints.Types of Clouds :Going further, there are various kinds of flavors in Cloud Computing that a business can choose to stick with. Depending on the need of the organization, a decision can be taken on whether an enterprise needs a Public, Private or Hybrid Cloud.Let’s briefly look at this in a bit detail.Public Cloud: This would be when an enterprise or business wants its resources to be available to everyone on the internet. The public cloud model allows users to utilize software that is hosted and managed by a third party and accessed through the internet, such as Google Drive. By allowing a third party to host and manage various aspects of computing, businesses can scale faster and save money on setup and management.Private Cloud: Private cloud infrastructure can be hosted in on-site data centers or by a third-party, but is managed by and accessible to the company alone. Companies can tailor private cloud infrastructure to meet the unique needs of the companies, specifically security and privacy needs. As opposed to the public cloud model, private clouds are not meant to be sold “as-a-service,” but is instead built and managed by each company, similar to a local or shared drive.Hybrid/Multi Cloud: This is just the combination of the private and public cloud. Here a company decided the nature of cloud services depending on resources and their access.Benefits of Cloud:Cost savings: The pay-as-you-go system also applies to the data storage space needed to service your stakeholders and clients. This means that you’ll get and pay for exactly as much space as you need.Security: For one thing, a cloud host’s full-time job is to carefully monitor security, which is significantly more efficient than a conventional in-house system. Because in the latter system, an organization must divide its efforts between a myriad of IT concerns, with security being only one of them.Flexibility: The cloud offers businesses more flexibility overall versus hosting on a local server. And, if you need extra bandwidth, a cloud-based service can meet that demand instantly, rather than undergoing a complex (and expensive) update to your IT infrastructure. This improved freedom and flexibility can make a significant difference to the overall efficiency of your organization.Mobility: Cloud computing allows mobile access to corporate data via smartphones and devices. This ensures everyone is updated considering over 2.6 billion smartphones being used globally today.Disaster recovery: Downtime in your services leads to lost productivity, revenue, and brand reputation. But while there may be no way for you to prevent or even anticipate the disasters that could potentially harm your organization, there is something you can do to help speed your recovery. Cloud-based services provide quick data recovery for all kinds of emergency scenarios from natural disasters to power outages. While 20 percent of cloud users claim disaster recovery in four hours or less, only 9 percent of non-cloud users could claim the same.Automatic software updates: For those who have a lot to get done, there isn’t anything more irritating than having to wait for a system update to be installed. Cloud-based applications automatically refresh and update themselves, instead of forcing an IT department to perform a manual organization-wide update.Competitive edge: While cloud computing is increasing in popularity, there are still those who prefer to keep everything local. That’s their choice, but doing so places them at a distinct disadvantage when competing with those who have the benefits of the cloud at their fingertips.My Experiences with Cloud :Talking of my own experience with cloud first-hand, I have a habit of maintaining and updating my own notes on the tasks I am performing. At the very early stages of my working career, I often maintained notes over some word files or notepad. But as the problem goes with traditional storage, accessing these notes irrespective of place and time was a hinderance. Then I soon realized that Microsoft’s OneNote was quite a solution to this problem. My notes got synced with the Microsoft Account and were accessible to me everywhere and anywhere I needed them. Later on, there were other apps such as Evernote that were synced with my mobile phone and offered me greater flexibility and control over my notes and data.Providing cloud-based storage users may be a small update form a company’ viewpoint; however, from the user perspective, this is a very significant change. It can alter the way you work and makes ones’ life far easier.I am also quite an avid reader, and I have a Kindle to satisfy my need to read. I also have a Kindle app on my mobile phone. Now if it weren’t for the cloud, I would have to carry either my mobile phone or Kindle to every possible place to maintain and continue the reading. But the Amazon Cloud syncs the Kindle application on the phone as well as the Kindle to a level such that I can pick up reading from where I left on my phone from Kindle and vice-versa. Basically the cloud synchronizes whatever I read on either of the devices to make life easier for me.Moreover, I have drafted and worked over this article as and when I could find time in the office, home or even while my commute in the bus! How was this possible? Yes, cloud.I worked on the MSWord online, and I could jot down my points, expand on them, add or edit them as something interesting struck my mind.Verdict:Cloud computing has been evolving the way businesses operate these days. Companies of all the shapes and sizes have been adapting to this new technology. Industry experts believe that cloud computing will continue to benefit the mid-sized and large companies in the coming few years.The Cloud is here to stay and the future is all “cloudy” (in a good way of course) with the growing needs and consumption of resources by Organizations and their clients. This is surely a way forward for also small businesses and individuals who also now need not worry about the price-overheads or infrastructure and just focus on the tasks.Also, it isn’t rocket science to understand that when businesses focus on the actual tasks to be performed rather than the overheads involved, they flourish.Data Sources:State of the Cloud 2018 ReportsSalesforce.com

Aziro Marketing

cloud cloud computing cloud storage private-cloud public cloud

Data Reduction: Maintaining the Performance for Modernized Cloud Storage Data

Going With the Winds of Time A recent white paper by IDC claims that 95% of organizations are bound to re-strategize their data protection strategy. The new workloads due to work from home requirements, SaaS, and containerized applications call for the modernization of our data protection blueprint. Moreover, if we need to get over our anxieties of data loss, we are to really work with services like AI/ML, Data analytics, and the Internet of Things. Substandard data protection at this point is neither economical nor smart. In this context, we already talked about methods like Data Redundancy and data versioning. However, data protection modernization extends to the third time of the process, one that helps reduces the capacity required to store the data. Data reduction enhances the storage efficiency, thus improving the organizations’ capability to manage and monitor the data while reducing the storage costs substantially. It is this process that we will talk about in detail in this blog. Expanding Possibilities With Data Reduction Working with infrastructures like Cloud object storage, block storage, etc., have relieved the data admins and their organizations from the overhead of storage capacity and cost optimization. The organizations now show more readiness towards Disaster recovery and data retention. Therefore, it only makes sense that we magnify the supposed benefits of these infrastructures by adding Data Reduction to the mix. Data reduction helps you manage the data copies and increase the efficacy value of its analytics. The workloads for DevOps or AI are particularly data-hungry and need more optimized storage premises to work with. In effect, data reduction can help you track the heavily shared data blocks and prioritize their caching for frequent use. Most of the vendors now notify you beforehand about the raw and effective capacities of the storage infra, where the latter is actually the capacity post data reduction. So, how do we achieve such optimization? The answer unfolds in 2 ways: Data Compression Data Deduplication We will now look at them one by one. Data Compression Data doesn’t necessarily have to be stored in its original size. The basic idea behind data compression is to store a code representing the original data. This code would acquire less space but would store all the information that the original data was supposed to store. With the number of bits to represent the original data reduced, the organization can save a lot on the storage capacity required, network bandwidth, and storage cost. Data compression uses algorithms that represent a longer sequence of data set with a sequence that’s shorter or smaller in size. Some algorithms also replace multiple unnecessary characters with a single character that uses smaller bytes and can compress the data to up to 50% of its original size. Based on the bits lost and data compressed, the compression process is known to be of 2 types: Lossy Compression Lossless Compression Lossy Compression Lossy compression prioritizes compression over redundant data. Thus, it permanently eliminates some of the information held by the data. It is highly likely that a user may get all their work done without having to need the lost information, and the compression may work just fine. Compression for multimedia data sets like videos, image files, sound files, etc., are often compressed using lossy algorithms. Lossless Compression Lossless compression is a little more complex, as here, the algorithms are not supposed to permanently eliminate the bits. Thus, in lossless algorithms, the compression is done based on the statistical redundancy in the data. By statistical redundancy, one simply means the recurrence of certain patterns that are near impossible to avoid in real-world data. Based on the redundancy of these patterns, the lossless algorithm creates the representational coding, which is smaller in size than the original data, thus compressed. A more sophisticated extension of lossless data compression is what inspired the idea for Data deduplication that we would study now. Data Deduplication Data deduplication enhances the storage capacity by using what is known as – Single Instance Storage. Essentially a specific amount of data sequence bytes (as long as 10KB) are compared against already existing data that holds such sequences. Thus, it ensures that a data sequence is not stored unless it is unique. However, this does not affect the data read, and the user applications can still retrieve the data as and when the file is written. What it actually does is avoid repeated copies and data sets over regular intervals of time. This enhances the storage capacity as well as the cost. Here’s how the whole process works: Step 1 – The Incoming Data Stream is segmented as per a pre-decided segment window Step 2 – Uniquely identified segments are compared against those already stored Step 3 – In case there’s no duplication found, the data segment is stored on the disk Step 4 – In case of a duplicate segment already existing, a reference to this existing segment is stored for future data retrievals and read. Thus, instead of storing multiple data sets, we have a single data set referred at multiple times. Data compression and deduplication substantially reduce the storage capacity requirements allowing larger volumes of data to be stored and processed for modern day tech-innovation. Some of the noted benefits of these data reduction techniques are: Improving bandwidth efficiency for the cloud storage by eliminating repeated data Reduces storage capacity requirement concerns for data backups Lowered storage cost by reducing the amount of storage space to be procured Improves the speed for disaster recovery as reduced duplicate data makes the transfer easy Final Thoughts Internet of Things, AI-based automation, data analytics powered business intelligence – all of these are the modern day use cases meant to refine the human experience. The common pre-requisite for all these is a huge capacity to deal with the incoming data juggernaut. Techniques like data redundancy and versioning protect the data from performance failures due to cyberattacks and erroneous activities. On the other hand, data reduction enhances the performance of the data itself by optimizing its size and storage requirements. The modernized data requirements need modernized data protection, and data reduction happens to be an integral part of it.

Aziro Marketing

cloud storage Cloud Storage Data data-storage

EXPLORE ALL TAGS

Ansible Test Automation

application containerization

applications

Application Security

application testing

artificial intelligence

asynchronous replication

business intelligence

Cloud Cost Optimization

cloud devops

Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Interoperability

Cloud Native Solution

Cloud Storage Security

Codeless Automation

Cognitive analytics

Configuration Management

container world conference

continuous-delivery

continuous deployment

continuous integration

data backup and recovery

Descriptive analytics

Descriptive analytics tools

Digital Transformation

dockercon 2019 san francisco

end-to-end-test-automation

High Performance Computing

icinga for monitoring

Image Recognition 2024

kubernetesday bangalore

Low-Code No-Code Platforms

mobile-application-testing

mobile-automation-testing

Predictive analytics tools

prescriptive analysis

Rapid Application Development

raspberry pi

RDMA

real time analytics

realtime analytics platforms

Real-time data analytics

Recovery

Recovery as a service

recovery as service

rsa

rsa 2019

rsa 2019 san francisco

Selenium Test Automation

selenium testng

serverless

Serverless Computing

Site Reliability Engineering

software defined storage

software-testing

software testing trends

software testing trends 2019

storage virtualization

support

Synchronous Replication

testing automation tools

thought leadership articles

trends

tutorials

ui automation testing

ui testing

ui testing automation

vCenter Operations Manager

vmworld 2019 san francisco

VMworld 2019 US

vROM

Web Automation Testing

web test automation

WFH

LET'S ENGINEER

Your Next Product Breakthrough

Book a Free 30-minute Meeting with our technology experts.

Aziro has been a true engineering partner in our digital transformation journey. Their AI-native approach and deep technical expertise helped us modernize our infrastructure and accelerate product delivery without compromising quality. The collaboration has been seamless, efficient, and outcome-driven.

CTO

Fortune 500 company