When you decide to use any cloud storage service, you and your employees will be able to log in from anywhere using internet, to upload and retrieve their data.
But all cloud storage providers don't offer the same level of data protection options to you including cloud encryption...
WHAT IS CLOUD ENCRYPTION?
Cloud encryption is the process of encoding or transforming data before it’s transferred to cloud storage.
You already know that encryption uses some mathematical algorithms to transform simple data (plaintext), may it be a text, file, code or image, to an unreadable form (ciphertext) that can conceal it from unauthorized and malicious users. It is the simplest and most vital way to make sure that your cloud data can’t be breached, stolen and read by someone with a malicious motive.
Cloud storage providers encrypt data and pass encryption keys to the users. These keys are used to safely decrypt data when needed. Decryption transforms the concealed data back into readable data.
You also know that the data that’s encrypted has basically three types: in transit, at rest and in use.
As far as methods of cloud data encryption is concerned, most people prefer using Asymmetric algorithm, over Symmetric one.
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Why Do You Need Cloud Encryption?You need cloud encryption because its main aim is-- to secure and protect confidential information as it is transmitted through the Internet and other computer systems. Whenever you wish to evaluate your organization’s security and privacy status, you do is through the CIA triad.
Traditionally, the most organizations only focused on the 'availability' of the data and its 'integrity.' But they did not give enough thought on data confidentiality. This is exactly the reason why cloud encryption should be used by your organization.
Moreover, in its core, digital data is always meant to be transmitted and encryption is needed to perform this transmission in a safe way. You want to ensure that your information is secure when transferred to another user and that the other user is who you intend to send the data to and not any malicious attackers. Right?
Typically, your data is most weak and prone to vulnerabilities when being transferred from somewhere to somewhere else. Encryption ensures security during this process.
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Challenges to Cloud EncryptionMost experts agree that encryption is the most effective approach to data security in the cloud, but it can be challenging. There are so many types of encryption services available in the online marketplace.
1. Cloud platform differences
There are three models with regards to the cloud platform, i.e., SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. Each of these models offers security solutions and perform different tasks to provide security to huge amount of data. Since there are the differences between these models, there are complexities in their encryption approaches. As a consequence, it is not that simple or easy for your cloud service provider to maintain and perform various encryption processes.
2. Complexity of Key management
With regard to encryption, Key Management is the most complicated issue of any security system and network. Key management is basically concerned with the process of --how you safeguard your encryption keys from loss, unauthorized access, and corruption.
However, key management is usually the major reason encryption is not being implemented by many organizations. Remember that Key management is the most difficult discipline within cryptography and requires extreme attention to detail by every vendor and user/operator...
3. Diversity of encryption architectural approaches
There are a lot of architectural approaches for encryption in the cloud, such as
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Application level
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File system based
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Agent-based
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Storage device level
These approaches have their own features that are based on the management of encryption keys and their performances.
But when encryption is implemented at cloud, they utilize various algorithms during the process. As a result, it is hard and challenging to establish connections and communication among these approaches.
4. Compliance regulations in different countries or locations
Cloud operators using encryption, have no choice but to adhere to the variety of compliance regulations in different territories. Thus, data encryption is not straightforward and goes through various processes before it gets done.
For instance, if your company is required to comply with a regulation in your country, but your data is internationally stored and encrypted (say, in USA), other compliance regulations in other countries might perform data assessment first. In consequence, the cloud storage provider will more likely to find it hard to manage and perform encryption on this occasion.
Here in India, we are seeing that Government is demanding many IT giants to store the data of Indian Citizens in datacenters which are located in India itself.
5. Shared Responsibility
The most responsibility for protecting cloud data lies with cloud service providers. However, you as cloud customers are not immune, you would have your own shared of this responsibility legally.
Because of the challenges mentioned above, whoever takes the responsibility of data encryption will need to overcome and manage them all. If most part of this challenge moves to your company, then you would have to make significant investment. And you will have to counter all the complexities of communication & collaboration with your Cloud service provider.
6. Not a Silver Bullet
While encryption in the cloud seems the silver bullet in data security, actually it is not. That's why you must take your 'Data Security Plan for Cloud' first. The complexity of cloud encryption creates a false sense of security. Do not fall in this trap!
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Best Practices For Cloud EncryptionIf you implement it correctly, encryption is not really that complex. At cloud, it should be your top-priority.
The following are encryption tips and best practices to protect and keep your organization’s information safe in the cloud:
1. 
Your organization should encrypt its data before you are uploading it. It’s best to make sure to encode the data beforehand, if the cloud service providers do not automatically encrypt your information. You can always use third-party encryption tools that provide encryption keys to files so that its data is encrypted before putting it into the cloud.
2.
You must ensure that your cloud data is backed up locally too. Because if your data that is stored in the cloud gets corrupted somehow, you can always rely on locally saved versions. Another good option is to store the data-backups on a separate cloud. For example, if you are using Google Drive exclusively, you should back up important files using Dropbox.
3.
You should secure the access to cloud-data with cloud cryptography. Cloud cryptography is another tool to protect your organization’s cloud computing architecture. You should know that Cloud computing services providers usually implement cryptography to provide a layer of encryption that is based on the Quantum Direct Key system. This means that this layer of information enables safe access to whoever needs shared cloud services. If you haven't bothered yet to know about this, ask your cloud storage provider a few questions.
4.
You should choose to use a CASB (Cloud Access Security Broker) service. It would protect you data not only when it is in-transit, but also when it is at rest. They provides a single point of access and visibility control into any cloud app. A CASB facilitates the connections between the general public or your users and cloud apps using proxies and API connectors. I hope you must have read the post on CASB which I shared recently.
Summarizingly, here are some basic advices:
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Sensitive data should be encrypted before it is transmitted from the organization to the cloud service provider.
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Sensitive data should be encrypted in use, at rest and in transit.
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The decryption keys should never be accessible to the cloud service provider and its staff.
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Sensitive data should be encrypted with random, long keys and approved algorithms.
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Do not depend only on Cloud Service Provider for encryption.
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Relying on low-level encryption too is strictly not advised.
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This Article Was Written & published by Meena R, Senior Manager - IT, at Luminis Consulting Services Pvt. Ltd, India.
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