How to Prevent Security Risks in the Private Cloud

A private cloud is an essential need for most enterprises and it comes with different risks in such an environment. Let’s dig into those risks and their prevention!

Organizations that want to use the cloud but don't want to entrust their data to an external provider build their own on-premises cloud, also known as a private cloud. They build their own infrastructure, buy their own software, and build an in-house team to oversee everything. While the goal is to stay in control of your data, this technique is fraught with security threats and other pitfalls. 

Haven't you ever thought about migrating to the cloud? If you are already migrated to the environment of a private cloud, there are a few security risks in the private cloud that are found crucial.  

Cloud adoption always comes with consequences and is said to be a very difficult decision that one has to face. Everything is planned and different strategies are made for that organization, as there are moving parts also involved in it. 

A public cloud is also an option that is provided to the companies but the private cloud is considered a safer option. A private cloud comes with additional security and there are various resources of cloud that reside in their data centers.  

With the advancement in security, many crucial security risks come with the private clouds that people should know. The IT administrators should also get the idea of how to address those security risks as they can lead to bigger problems.  

Many admins go for the private clouds because they will get exclusive access to the resources of the cloud and their single-tenant environments. On the other hand, the private cloud also provide scalability, performance, and self-service.  

The admins are required to get familiar with these risks to protect their virtual systems and data. 

What Is a Private Cloud? 

The cloud, which resides in the hosted data center, is known as a private cloud or enterprise cloud where all the data is protected behind a firewall. The existing infrastructures can also be easily used by organizations that have their own data centers.  

Private clouds are more popular these days as the security of a company’s data matters a lot and, of course, so do its other functionalities too. OpenStack allows you to create private clouds, however, it is not an easy task that one can easily encounter. It always takes helping hands to complete a highly technical task and your team should be efficient enough to run everything smoothly.  

There are a few problems, like the responsibility of management, keeping things up to date, and the maintenance of the private cloud. You might also be required to replace the servers after a while which can cost you a whole lot of money.  

When it comes to security, the private cloud is completely secured and there is absolutely no room for data leakage in most cases. Even if there are any resources available, the private clouds share very few of them with the organization.  

Outdated VM Images Management 

The VM images that are outdated are considered one of the largest risks to the security of the environments of a private cloud. The user is provided with the ability to act as a tenant when the admin grants that user access to the private cloud to create the VMs from the admin's provided VM templates.   

The admin has no idea whether or not the user is a cybersecurity expert or can adhere to the best practices of security for the cloud. Admins are also required to create such VMs that stick to the security requirements for the organization. 

When the VM templates are created, the admin is required to keep the templates up to date and also the security of the organization. One should create a new VM or update them when the practices of security change or there are patches available.

Dangers of Misusing the Powers of Admin     

Insider abuse is also considered an issue of potential security. To share the hardware resources, some of the admins might require multi-tenant private clouds. Some of the admins might also use a common set of storage devices and hosts to easily service all the tenants.  

The tenant admins do not break out of the space of the cloud and access the resources of another tenant. However, an admin could access the sensitive resources of the tenant within the IT department.  

There are many ways in which the IT department can be restricted to engage in any such abuse. The admins should use the role-based access control to limit the scope of the administrative access to prevent the admin from limiting the access to any of the resources. 

The admins should also enable the logging of audits but this step is needed to be ensured that only the HR department should access the logs.  

Some of the security features can also disable some of the features of security. For example, a rogue admin can modify the policy of the group that would no longer require any of the passwords or turn off the firewall of windows. 

Data Loss Risk 

One of the most crucial risks of security in a private cloud is the loss of data that is not backed up. The admin might consider the data to be backed up by the IT department in an organization within their private cloud resources. 

This can lead to an immense situation where the data is lost and no backup is available during a critical failure. Backing up the virtual machine of the tenant is a necessity for the admins.  

Final Verdict 

There are always risks involved in the migration to the cloud, but the benefits are bigger than the risks at every stage. Be it public or public cloud, there are certain security risks, but above we have briefly discussed the security risks that are involved in the private clouds.  

Everything comes with a solution and these security risks can also be easily overlapped by taking the security measures. But if the security issues are not taken care of, your organization might face some bigger problems in terms of security breaches, or the loss of data. 

Organizations should always take security measures as these matters cannot be left unattended. Whenever the public and private cloud is compared, most people trust the private cloud for their organizations because it is a reliable option that the public cloud.

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