Entries Tagged "cloud computing"

Page 4 of 9

Should Companies Do Most of Their Computing in the Cloud? (Part 2)

Let me start by describing two approaches to the cloud.

Most of the students I meet at Harvard University live their lives in the cloud. Their e-mail, documents, contacts, calendars, photos and everything else are stored on servers belonging to large internet companies in America and elsewhere. They use cloud services for everything. They converse and share on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. They seamlessly switch among their laptops, tablets and phones. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that they don’t really care where their computers end and the internet begins, and they are used to having immediate access to all of their data on the closest screen available.

In contrast, I personally use the cloud as little as possible. My e-mail is on my own computer—I am one of the last Eudora users—and not at a web service like Gmail or Hotmail. I don’t store my contacts or calendar in the cloud. I don’t use cloud backup. I don’t have personal accounts on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. (This makes me a freak, but highly productive.) And I don’t use many software and hardware products that I would otherwise really like, because they force you to keep your data in the cloud: Trello, Evernote, Fitbit.

Why don’t I embrace the cloud in the same way my younger colleagues do? There are three reasons, and they parallel the trade-offs corporations faced with the same decisions are going to make.

The first is control. I want to be in control of my data, and I don’t want to give it up. I have the ability to keep control by running my own services my way. Most of those students lack the technical expertise, and have no choice. They also want services that are only available on the cloud, and have no choice. I have deliberately made my life harder, simply to keep that control. Similarly, companies are going to decide whether or not they want to—or even can—keep control of their data.

The second is security. I talked about this at length in my opening statement. Suffice it to say that I am extremely paranoid about cloud security, and think I can do better. Lots of those students don’t care very much. Again, companies are going to have to make the same decision about who is going to do a better job, and depending on their own internal resources, they might make a different decision.

The third is the big one: trust. I simply don’t trust large corporations with my data. I know that, at least in America, they can sell my data at will and disclose it to whomever they want. It can be made public inadvertently by their lax security. My government can get access to it without a warrant. Again, lots of those students don’t care. And again, companies are going to have to make the same decisions.

Like any outsourcing relationship, cloud services are based on trust. If anything, that is what you should take away from this exchange. Try to do business only with trustworthy providers, and put contracts in place to ensure their trustworthiness. Push for government regulations that establish a baseline of trustworthiness for cases where you don’t have that negotiation power. Fight laws that give governments secret access to your data in the cloud. Cloud computing is the future of computing; we need to ensure that it is secure and reliable.

Despite my personal choices, my belief is that, in most cases, the benefits of cloud computing outweigh the risks. My company, Resilient Systems, uses cloud services both to run the business and to host our own products that we sell to other companies. For us it makes the most sense. But we spend a lot of effort ensuring that we use only trustworthy cloud providers, and that we are a trustworthy cloud provider to our own customers.

This essay previously appeared on the Economist website, as part of a debate on cloud computing. It’s the second of three essays. Here are Parts 1 and 3. Visit the site for the other side of the debate and other commentary.

Posted on June 10, 2015 at 11:27 AM • View Comments

Should Companies Do Most of Their Computing in the Cloud? (Part 1)

Yes. No. Yes. Maybe. Yes. Okay, it’s complicated.

The economics of cloud computing are compelling. For companies, the lower operating costs, the lack of capital expenditure, the ability to quickly scale and the ability to outsource maintenance are just some of the benefits. Computing is infrastructure, like cleaning, payroll, tax preparation and legal services. All of these are outsourced. And computing is becoming a utility, like power and water. Everyone does their power generation and water distribution “in the cloud.” Why should IT be any different?

Two reasons. The first is that IT is complicated: it is more like payroll services than like power generation. What this means is that you have to choose your cloud providers wisely, and make sure you have good contracts in place with them. You want to own your data, and be able to download that data at any time. You want assurances that your data will not disappear if the cloud provider goes out of business or discontinues your service. You want reliability and availability assurances, tech support assurances, whatever you need.

The downside is that you will have limited customization options. Cloud computing is cheaper because of economics of scale, and­—like any outsourced task—­you tend to get what you get. A restaurant with a limited menu is cheaper than a personal chef who can cook anything you want. Fewer options at a much cheaper price: it’s a feature, not a bug.

The second reason that cloud computing is different is security. This is not an idle concern. IT security is difficult under the best of circumstances, and security risks are one of the major reasons it has taken so long for companies to embrace the cloud. And here it really gets complicated.

On the pro-cloud side, cloud providers have the potential to be far more secure than the corporations whose data they are holding. It is the same economies of scale. For most companies, the cloud provider is likely to have better security than them­—by a lot. All but the largest companies benefit from the concentration of security expertise at the cloud provider.

On the anti-cloud side, the cloud provider might not meet your legal needs. You might have regulatory requirements that the cloud provider cannot meet. Your data might be stored in a country with laws you do not like­—or cannot legally use. Many foreign companies are thinking twice about putting their data inside America, because of laws allowing the government to get at that data in secret. Other countries around the world have even more draconian government-access rules.

Also on the anti-cloud side, a large cloud provider is a juicier target. Whether or not this matters depends on your threat profile. Criminals already steal far more credit card numbers than they can monetize; they are more likely to go after the smaller, less-defended networks. But a national intelligence agency will prefer the one-stop shop a cloud provider affords. That is why the NSA broke into Google’s data centers.

Finally, the loss of control is a security risk. Moving your data into the cloud means that someone else is controlling that data. This is fine if they do a good job, but terrible if they do not. And for free cloud services, that loss of control can be critical. The cloud provider can delete your data on a whim, if it believes you have violated some term of service that you never even knew existed. And you have no recourse.

As a business, you need to weigh the benefits against the risks. And that will depend on things like the type of cloud service you’re considering, the type of data that’s involved, how critical the service is, how easily you could do it in house, the size of your company and the regulatory environment, and so on.

This essay previously appeared on the Economist website, as part of a debate on cloud computing. It’s the first of three essays. Here are Parts 2 and 3. Visit the site for the other side of the debate and other commentary.

Posted on June 10, 2015 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Nice Essay on Security Snake Oil

This is good:

Just as “data” is being sold as “intelligence”, a lot of security technologies are being sold as “security solutions” rather than what they for the most part are, namely very narrow focused appliances that as a best case can be part of your broader security effort.

Too many of these appliances do unfortunately not easily integrate with other appliances or with the rest of your security portfolio, or with your policies and procedures. Instead, they are created to work and be operated as completely stand-alone devices. This really is not what we need. To quote Alex Stamos, we need platforms. Reusable platforms that easily integrate with whatever else we decide to put into our security effort.

Slashdot thread.

Posted on April 28, 2015 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

Apple Copies Your Files Without Your Knowledge or Consent

The latest version of Apple’s OS automatically syncs your files to iCloud Drive, even files you choose to store locally. Apple encrypts your data, both in transit and in iCloud, with a key it knows. Apple, of course, complies with all government requests: FBI warrants, subpoenas, and National Security Letters—as well as NSA PRISM and whatever-else-they-have demands.

EDITED TO ADD (10/28): See comments. This seems to be way overstated. I will look at this again when I have time, probably tomorrow.

EDITED TO ADD (10/28): This is a more nuanced discussion of this issue. At this point, it seems clear that there is a lot less here than described in the blog post below.

EDITED TO ADD (10/29): There is something here. It only affects unsaved documents, and not all applications. But the OS’s main text editor is one of them. Yes, this feature has been in the OS for a while, but that’s not a defense. It’s both dangerous and poorly documented.

Posted on October 28, 2014 at 6:21 AM • View Comments

The NSA's Private Cloud

The NSA is building a private cloud with its own security features:

As a result, the agency can now track every instance of every individual accessing what is in some cases a single word or name in a file. This includes when it arrived, who can access it, who did access it, downloaded it, copied it, printed it, forwarded it, modified it, or deleted it.

[…]

“All of this I can do in the cloud but—in many cases—it cannot be done in the legacy systems, many of which were created before such advanced data provenance technology existed.” Had this ability all been available at the time, it is unlikely that U.S. soldier Bradley Manning would have succeeded in obtaining classified documents in 2010.

Maybe.

Posted on October 2, 2014 at 6:58 AM • View Comments

Security Trade-offs of Cloud Backup

This is a good essay on the security trade-offs with cloud backup:

iCloud backups have not eliminated this problem, but they have made it far less common. This is, like almost everything in tech, a trade-off:

  • Your data is far safer from irretrievable loss if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.
  • Your data is more at risk of being stolen if it is synced/backed up, regularly, to a cloud-based service.

Ideally, the companies that provide such services minimize the risk of your account being hijacked while maximizing the simplicity and ease of setting it up and using it. But clearly these two goals are in conflict. There’s no way around the fact that the proper balance is somewhere in between maximal security and minimal complexity.

Further, I would wager heavily that there are thousands and thousands more people who have been traumatized by irretrievable data loss (who would have been saved if they’d had cloud-based backups) than those who have been victimized by having their cloud-based accounts hijacked (who would have been saved if they had only stored their data locally on their devices).

It is thus, in my opinion, terribly irresponsible to advise people to blindly not trust Apple (or Google, or Dropbox, or Microsoft, etc.) with “any of your data” without emphasizing, clearly and adamantly, that by only storing their data on-device, they greatly increase the risk of losing everything.

It’s true. For most people, the risk of data loss is greater than the risk of data theft.

Posted on September 25, 2014 at 2:17 PM • View Comments

Security of Password Managers

At USENIX Security this year, there were two papers studying the security of password managers:

It’s interesting work, especially because it looks at security problems in something that is supposed to improve security.

I’ve long recommended a password manager to solve the very real problem that any password that can be easily remembered is vulnerable to a dictionary attack. The world got a visceral reminder of this earlier this week, when hackers posted iCloud photos from celebrity accounts. The attack didn’t exploit a flaw in iCloud; the attack exploited weak passwords.

Security is often a trade-off with convenience, and most password managers automatically fill in passwords on browser pages. This turns out to be a difficult thing to do securely, and opens up password managers to attack.

My own password manager, Password Safe, wasn’t mentioned in either of these papers. I specifically designed it not to automatically fill. I specifically designed it to be a standalone application. The fast way to transfer a password from Password Safe to a browser page is by using the operating system’s cut and paste commands.

I still recommend using a password manager, simply because it allows you to choose longer and stronger passwords. And for the few passwords you should remember, my scheme for generating them is here.

EDITED TO ADD (9/12): The second paper was updated to include PasswordSafe. And this 2012 paper on password managers does include PasswordSafe.

Posted on September 5, 2014 at 5:18 AM • View Comments

1 2 3 4 5 6 … 9

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.