Potential Risks of Cloud Hosting

Cloud computing is perhaps one of the most misunderstood technologies that almost everybody uses without knowing it. It’s time to separate the real risks from the imaginary ones.

Cloud computing in general is just a mechanism to provide infrastructure (as in cloud hosting), applications, or services over the Internet or a private IP connection, while abstracting the physical layer. The Internet itself is a “cloud”, or more appropriately, an “uber-cloud” out of which smaller clouds can be made. A cloud hosting company, which delivers infrastructure-as-a-service (web hosting), has taken the step of virtualizing a group of web servers and delivering dynamic access to that resource and billing it as a utility. The physical servers still remain under the control of the hosting company, and all the standard security precautions are taken.

The greatest risk is that even though virtualization has been applied to make it appear as though you are running your own private environment, cloud hosting is still based on a multi-tenant architecture at the physical level. For companies that need to maintain web sites that require ultra-high security, a multi-tenant architecture may not be advisable. If you’re the FBI for example, or if you’re a national lab maintaining vital information on defense technology, you want to run your own server, and probably already do. And all the people that touch that server have security clearance. But, for most people, that level of security isn’t practical nor is it needed.

When accessing any type of multi-tenant architecture however, you do need to understand that your cloud provider is trustworthy, and that they have taken appropriate steps to secure your information, as well as their own physical data center. Examine their policies, security protocols and uptime guarantees carefully.