An article by Bahman Saless, CEO of Earthnet, was featured in the Denver Business Journal online April 14: “Cloud solutions for business: Why ‘private’ could be best.”
Tactics NSA leaker Edward J. Snowden used to breach one of the world’s most guarded computer systems were not exactly material for a James Bond movie.
And he’s not alone.
Numerous breaches of computer networks have been reported recently, and many involved low-tech methods or problems. More than 7 million patient health records, for example, were reportedly breached last year, an increase over the previous year.
Though the breaches involved a variety of problems and types of networks, they illustrate the vulnerabilities of the rapidly increasing number of public clouds, which are shared data centers used to store and process some of the most sensitive personal, government and business information.
By allowing large numbers of users to share a multitude of computing resources, public clouds offer access to vastly increased computer capabilities at only a fraction of the cost of creating and maintaining individual systems.This could be compared to communal gardens that allow people to plant and grow without buying and maintaining individual parcels of land and separate irrigation systems.
Risks of the public cloud
But public clouds come with risks.
One of the most common techniques to breach security is to use a web crawler, or spider, to “scrape” data. Web crawlers are just one of many threats faced by the growing number of public clouds people and institutions are trusting with their information.
In 2011, the public cloud service market was estimated at $91 billion. In 2016, it’s expected to be more than double that: $207 billion.
Read the rest of the story here.
