What Is Cloud Security?

Introduction
The typical organization today is living through truly astounding times. Just over the last five to ten years, we’ve seen technology-focused solutions completely transform the modern business environment in almost every way imaginable. At every level, whether it’s the way an organization provides solutions for its customers, how the organization fundamentally functions, or how employees communicate internally, technology solutions have dramatically reimagined today’s business. 

Unfortunately, we’re also finding that cyber fraudsters, hackers, malware, and ransomware are also becoming more technologically-advanced, allowing these bad actors to find new ways to uncover entry points and vulnerabilities into today’s business. The statistics around cybercrime are truly astonishing. Found by the University of Maryland, malicious hackers are now attacking computers and networks at a rate of one attack every 39 seconds. Another report from the CyberEdge Group 2020 Cybertheft Defense found 81% of surveyed organizations were affected by a successful cyberattack.

What Is Cloud Security?
To combat the growing risk of cyberattacks, cloud environments are now developed with enhanced cloud security policies to ensure that cloud-based applications and cloud workloads are protected. 

Many long-time business owners may be wary of the cloud, assuming that they will incur a security vulnerability by sending sensitive information outside their environment. However, this assumption couldn’t be farther from the truth. Today, public cloud environments are some of the most secure data centers in the world. These environments allow companies to benefit from the latest and greatest security solutions and strategies without actually buying the hardware and implementing it on-premises.  

Challenges With Traditional Solutions
Many organizations may not realize that the technology solutions deemed secure even five years ago can be a vulnerability target by these bad actors today. One great example of this is how certain data transfer protocols such as basic FTP are not designed with built-in security. See, as technology progresses both in protecting organizations and exploiting organizations, certain traditional technologies can become a risk and a vulnerability concern.  

Traditional Transfer Protocols
For years, organizations have used transfer protocols such as FTP and HTTP to transfer and collaborate on data within an organization. Unfortunately, these traditional methods are presenting challenges for today’s business. FTP, for instance, does not have any built-in security protocols to ensure the data in transit. Today, transferring data without a strict advanced security protocol can result in the stealing of sensitive data or a middle-man attack as a way for bad actors to gain access to your sensitive environment. So, what are organizations doing to combat these challenges?

IBM Aspera’s FASP File Transfer
Today, organizations are improving their data transmission and collaboration strategy by implementing the IBM Aspera solution for file transfer and collaboration. Aspera’s FASP, built on the cloud, is a data transmission protocol that securely transmits files, folders, and large datasets up to 100x faster than protocols such as FTP. This technology leverages the cloud’s inherent security protocols to ensure full end-to-end security as organizations transmit data. 

A top priority in the development of Aspera’s FASP data transmission protocol is security. Via the IBM Aspera Security Model, Aspera provides secured data transmission by:

• Securely transmitting data via the OpenSSL toolkit enabled by the OpenSSL cryptographic library

• Establishment of a secure, encrypted session between endpoints via SSH

• Once SSH is established, Aspera performs a three-way handshake where the client endpoint generates an AES key, supporting AES 128,192 or 256-bit encryption

• The Aspera FASP transport encryption includes support for both AES-CFB and AES-GCM cipher modes. Each mode can be independently configured in server configuration files as well as through the command-line client.

Next Steps
If you are considering improving upon your data transmission and data collaboration strategy, consider IBM Aspera. Built with security in mind, Aspera can transfer data up to 100 times faster than traditional protocols, supporting today’s requirements for today’s business. As a premier IBM business partner with Gold Partner status, we here at PacGenesis are proud to be able to provide organizations with IBM solutions such as Aspera.  

With over ten years of experience in supporting organizations as they look to improve upon their data transfer capabilities, we are proud to hold the reputation as a trusted and dependable advisor in cybersecurity and data security.

To learn more about PacGenesis, follow @PacGenesis on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, or go to www.pacgenesis.com.

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