Cloud technology risks are crucial to analyze beforehand, as they enable businesses to navigate with caution. Security, cost management, vendor lock-in, compliance, and legal risks are some uncertainties that accompany the adoption of cloud technologies. As a result, it is a necessity to encourage and implement the best and most secure computing practices.
The Necessity to Tackle Cloud Technology Risks:
Although the cloud offers several advantages, including cost efficiency, flexibility, and scalability, to organizations of varying sizes, businesses should exercise caution in certain aspects.
What are the Different Cloud Technology Risks?
Cost Controlling Measures:
Although cloud computing technologies offer flexible payment modes with features like pay-as-you-go, there is a risk that organizations may end up paying heavy bills. The likelihood of such a scenario occurring is high if there is a lack of systematic monitoring, along with inadequate controls and unclear provisioning.
Avoiding such unwanted requests is essential, as such businesses should enable cost-tracking tags. Furthermore, implement auto-shutdown policies, right-size resource matches, and governance policy controls.
The primary cause of these exceptions is the formation of an infinite loop in serverless functions, resulting in thousands of executions. Therefore, they should effectively manage and avoid such loopholes by implementing proper planning, tracking, and automating the business process.
Security Risks:
With the public cloud permitting multiple users to access the resources, there are higher security risks involved. In some cases, particularly while accessing or storing resources from public cloud storage, there is an increasing chance of data leaks.
Due to such breaches, there is a risk that unauthorized sources may access sensitive data. Also, there are chances for exploiting APIs, particularly those that are poorly secured. Preventing such risks is possible by restricting sensitive data to the private cloud rather than the public cloud.
Although cloud technologies are known for offering resilient infrastructure with high availability, they are not immune to downtime. The impact of such consequences is huge and disrupts the workflow of organizations, particularly those that rely on their mission-critical operations in the cloud. Hence, it is essential to design systems meticulously with the capability for resilience, continuously monitor those systems, and prepare for impending failures.
Misconfiguration:
It typically occurs when the user accidentally configures a database with an option that allows public write or read access. In other words, it allows incorrect cloud settings, such as public buckets and open ports, to be created accidentally. Among the various cloud technology risks, misconfiguration is a prominent one that organizations should prevent by implementing effective procedures.
What Causes Downtime of Cloud Solutions:
Here, downtime refers to the period during which cloud services are unavailable. Numerous reasons may contribute to cloud downtime. Hardware or software failures, natural disasters, misconfigurations, network issues and provider outages are some common reasons for downtime. Organizations feel the impact of downtime in many ways, including data inconsistency, which can result in transactional failures. SLA violations that breach service-level agreements can damage brand reputation, with a risk of losing customers. And financial loss due to revenue loss during downtime. Most importantly, service unavailability hinders users from accessing apps or websites.
Organizations that need to mitigate such cloud technology risks need to employ certain measures to prepare for adverse conditions effectively. They include deploying workloads across diverse regions, load balancing measures for rerouting traffic, as well as simulating downtimes to enhance resilience. Back up the data at regular intervals and implement real-time monitoring to detect downtime beforehand. And avail DDoS Protection services such as Cloudflare and AWS Shield.
Subsequently, organizations need to take precautions when operating or dealing with cloud technologies and managing their data and systems. All such measures will positively mitigate cloud technology risks.