{"id":24946,"date":"2015-03-09T13:18:03","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T17:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/?p=24946"},"modified":"2015-03-09T13:18:03","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T17:18:03","slug":"not-all-clouds-are-the-same","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.solidworks.com\/solidworksblog\/2015\/03\/not-all-clouds-are-the-same.html","title":{"rendered":"Not all Clouds Are the Same"},"content":{"rendered":"

The other day, while the dense, grey clouds were dumping enough snow in Boston to push the winter snowfall over the \u201c100th<\/sup> inch\u201d mark, I was relaxing on the beach in Miami looking at the fluffy, soft clouds scattered across the blue sky, and reflecting on one of the cruel realities of life, \u2013 not all the clouds are the same. This is especially true when it comes to the clouds you are using for your business and product development process.<\/p>\n

\"cloudguy1\"Every day, cloud-based services are playing bigger and more important role in our personal and work lives. \u00a0Cloud offerings are becoming so much more than just renting and accessing hardware, owned by someone else, while you provide, install and manage the software. Today, \u2018The Cloud<\/strong>\u2019 is the whole, inclusive experience<\/em> of using Software as a Service (SaaS), to enable your business and product development process. \u00a0The cloud experience requires that any software or applications used in the SaaS environment must be designed and developed with this in mind \u2013 developed for being deployed and used in the cloud environment.<\/p>\n

Being safe<\/strong> in the cloud is a combination of many aspects of your overall cloud experience and includes infrastructure security, software architecture, user and access management capabilities, collaboration workflows, etc. All of these components must work in synch in order to give you a secure solution, and more importantly, peace of mind.<\/p>\n

Different cloud providers deploy different security strategies. One of the leading security concepts relies on the fact that several independent mechanisms are put in place in order to mitigate any single risk. An unlikely failure to block the malevolent action will therefore not result in a threat but will be subsequently blocked by a different mechanism. This approach provides the \u2018Security in Depth<\/strong>\u2019 aspect of a cloud environment.<\/p>\n

In order to be protected from Internet attacks, Cloud providers should deploy several security layers to ensure that only intended traffic and activities are actually let through and processed. All incoming Internet traffic is filtered by independent mechanisms ensuring reliability and lack of vulnerability cascading. Moreover, the internet-scale hosting environment should be resistant to Distributed Denial of Service attacks.\"cloudguy2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There also could be attempts to intercept your communication and steal your data while in transit. Encryption and secure communication\u00a0channels between the cloud environment and the customer\u2019s device should be used, to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the transferred data.<\/p>\n

These and many more security measure aligned with industry standards and best practices — such as ISO 2700x standards, NIST 800 series, OWASP methodologies, CobIT framework, etc. — \u00a0should be in place in order for your cloud to be secure and protected from the outside attacks. \u00a0There has been a lot of work in recent years to condense these security concerns and protocols into a global standard, but it is still work in progress.<\/p>\n

But what about security that can only be achieved by specific architecture and capabilities of the application deployed on the cloud? Consider the following:<\/p>\n