Cloud-10 Accountability and Data Ownership

R1:Accountability and Data Ownership
A traditional data center of an organization is under complete control of that organization. The organization logically and physically protects the data it owns. For economical reasons, an organization may choose to use a public cloud for hosting its business services. In this case, the organization loses control of its data. This poses critical security risks that the organization needs to carefully consider and mitigate.

The severity of risks depends on the sensitivity of the data stored in the cloud. Informal blogs, twitter posts, public news, and newsgroup messages are examples of less sensitive data. The risk of hosting such data in the cloud is low. On the contrary, data such as health-related records, criminal records, credit history, and payroll information is highly sensitive business data. There are serious business and legal ramifications if such data is compromised. Therefore, the risk of hosting such data in the cloud is very high.

Since data in the cloud is physically in control of the cloud provider, the foremost risk is that of ensuring confidentiality of the stored data. Encryption can be employed to ensure confidentiality. If the cloud provider uses multi-tenancy architecture, then separate encryption keys, one per cloud consumer, should be employed.

A cloud provider may physically store a consumer's data in various countries. Such architecture poses several risks. For example, a country has its own legal system, and the cloud provider operating in that country is bound to that system. The laws of a country may force a cloud provider to permit legal officials to access the data, and any encryption keys, stored in that country's geographical boundary. The physical location of data can additionally have economic ramifications. For example, the tax rules vary based on the country in which sales orders are processed. A cloud consumer may not be able to benefit economically by processing orders in a country that offers lowest tax rates, since the cloud provider may store orders data in any country.

A cloud provider may store the consumer's data in its premises, or employ an Infrastructure-As-A-Provider (IAAS) for data storage. The provider may use multi-tenancy architecture which collocates data of multiple cloud consumers in one physical storage. This architecture may lack appropriate controls to ensure that a cloud consumer can access only its own data, and not the data of other consumers. If the cloud consumers are competitors in their business domain, then such such lack of control can pose serious business risks for the consumers.

Upon a request to delete some data, a cloud provider may only nominally delete it, and leave traces that can be used to reconstruct the original data. Such reconstructed data can be stolen, and misused, posing a significant risk to the cloud consumer.

To mitigate various data related risks, an organization that uses a cloud for conducting business should do the following:

1. Understand how the cloud provider secures the data and how the provider detects and reports a compromise.

2. Know the geographical location of the data storage, and ensure that the provider will not store data in a restricted country.

3. Know the situations in which a third party or a government can sieze the data from the provider. The provider should provide advanced notification of such event.

4. Ensure that the cloud provider appropriately protects data based on the data classification as specified by the consumer, and to address the concerns of privacy laws such as HIPPA.

5. The provider by default denies all access to the consumer's data. The consumer organization can explicitly grant access with specific privilege to desired parties.

6. The provider encrypts the data at rest, and the data in transit.

7. The provider logically isolates the data of multiple consumers in such a way so as to prevent any unauthorized access, modification, or deletion of the data.

8. Understand how the cloud provider manages ecnryption for multiple consumers. Instead of a single encryption key for all consumers, the provider should use (atleast) one key per consumer.

9. Verify that the provider destroys deleted data in such a way that it cannot be later recreated.

10. In case of a data breach, make the cloud provider pay certain penalty.

Real-world incident: On July 15, 2009, Twitter disclosed that a hacker accessed a substantial amount of company data stored on Google Apps by first hijacking a Twitter employee's official e-mail account. Though the breach had more to do with weak passwords and password resets, the incident has nevertheless drawn fresh attention to broader security and privacy concerns related to cloud computing.