How Exposed is Your Cloud Infrastructure?
Cloud computing is one of the hottest trends in today’s IT world. Companies are racing to switch from on-premises data centers to using public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Even the United States DOD has decided to move it’s infrastructure to the cloud. The contract was won by Azure who bested AWS in the last stage of the bid for a 10 billion dollar contract for 10 years. This move highlights the importance of cloud computing in providing a resilient infrastructure that can handle increasing amounts of data while keeping costs at a minimum.
However, with cloud computing comes new challenges. Hosting your enterprises’ entire digital infrastructure on a public cloud will expose you to more cyber-threats than on-premises approaches. The fact that your traffic will pass through the public internet network will mean that you are exposed to traffic analysis and sniffing attacks. Address spoofing and Man in The Middle attacks are also a possible risk. In essence, whenever an IT system is connected to a public network the security risk increases considerably.
But I am a simple student running some labs and websites to learn and test new concepts and software, what possible risks could I face? after all there is almost nothing to gain by spending resources and time to launch an attack on my “cloud infrastructure”. Or so did I think!
