Cloud Security and Residency
November 3, 2010 Santa Clara, CA—Cloud Expo—Tony Woloszyn, CTO of PerspecSys gave a talk entitled “Best of Both Worlds: Data Privacy, Residency, and Security in the Cloud” in one session. He proposed a public-private hybrid cloud as a solution.
The biggest issue for any cloud operation is security. Attacks have gone from a commercialization of hacks to new attack tools like Stuxnet, which is like a cruise missile of cyber attacks. This latest virus used multiple, dedicated attack vectors to find a specific configuration to disrupt, and had the same level of sophistication as enterprise-level applications.
But it’s not just outside attacks that need attention. Cloud operators need to consider data privacy, regulatory compliance, industry standards, and internal directives in any installation. Next, there is the issue of data redundancy, and the aspects of control and governance as well as the problems of backup and review of those backups.
The number and variety of laws is rapidly increasing. The EU had its data protection directive and other areas are considering privacy legislation. On top of this concern for privacy, locales are defining safe harbor principles and extending them through laws like the Patriot Act and RIPA, which will allow Internet wiretaps. Plain encryption, even at high levels, is no longer sufficient. On top of the laws, the software industry is developing new regulation for application areas like financial services, public sector, health care and defense.
Data residency is also being targeted for government audits and single copies of data are not considered to be robust enough for many functions. Backup and archiving are needed for on-line operations as well as disaster recovery. A robust system needs to set controls for access and for use levels. Unfortunately, there are few standards for the industry, and there is a lot of legislation in the pipe to address the issues.
A security solution need to have protection from internal threats. The enterprise needs to qualify its own users as well as the safety of its partners and customers. In addition, the networks needs to protect against phishing, and domestic and foreign sponsored threats. The same goes for cloud vendors who must secure their own facilities while ensuring that their customers and partners are also safe.
The ability to control the system differs for on- versus off-site configurations. The on-site systems only have to address data governance, configurations, access control, and risk management. The cloud-based systems must also ensure physical security, threat management across multiple access points, high availability, continuous maintenance, location transparency, multi-tenancy, and multi-jurisdiction issues.
The value the cloud offers over private systems includes larger sets of resources for management and the ability to spread costs over a large number of users and clients. The economies of scale allow the costs to change from 8:1 for license:maintenance for in-house services to 1:1 for cloud services.
To provide data security, users must define their basic configuration to segregate sensitive data from the rest of the data. Then identify and tokenize those sensitive data in their separate storage areas. The data are replaced by a token in the cloud. The token is a place holder that is used in place of the actual data. When it is displayed back to the user, it is changed back to clear text. This is a bidirectional function that needs pre-and post-processing to transfer or block the data or token.
All services access the sensitive data through a proxy server. Due to conflicts in laws, encryption is not practical for large data sets. The time to upload for large data sets provides hackers too many opportunities to match the data features, and rotating keys are difficult to manage. Instead, tokenizing the data and randomizing the tokens makes it possible to set up queries only to the specific data through the tokens.
On-premises security requires the user to control data governance, access control, risk management, and data and application complexity. The cloud, on the other hand, can address the issues by simply inserting a reverse proxy between the Web and the resources. An external reverse proxy provides location transparency and makes the data access look like a local access. It allows the data to be routed through the enterprise before the cloud.
When partners want to integrate shared sessions, the sessions share an ID for that session. The reverse proxy works here also, because the external software only interacts with the local data and does not have access to the total database. This approach works for multi-jurisdiction operations where different rules apply in the separate areas. All solutions use a data appliance working through a trusted hosting provider enabling multi-user configurations. This becomes an extension of the public cloud with redirection for sensitive data.
For example, a mail transfer agent has to provide access to and from the cloud. By routing the email through a mail transfer agent, the sensitive data stays local while the cloud services and other interactions still adhere to the existing policies and procedures.
A hybrid system allows unified enterprise and cloud services that meet the requirements of security. Functions and systems that need to be kept behind a firewall can be in the enterprise while everything else can be in the cloud. As long as the users’ expectations and experiences are not changed, the transformation is transparent. This functionality can be in hardware or software, but IT people don’t want to add in a new black box to the system. The system performs with a little added latency and the forward and reverse proxy functions are similar to a cache. The key is to have a strategy for data management.
