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Cloud computing is rapidly increasing across industries as companies majorly data-driven organizations are heavily moving their systems to cloud. It does not only help in data storage and management, but also enables access to data anytime, anywhere over the internet. However, providing a wide range of advantages, cloud computing has also brought security concerns over data, particularly when stored in a public cloud.

As it is indispensable for organizations to make sure digital safety, accountability of cloud security is becoming a major thing for cloud service providers and enterprises as well. Though securing data in any environment requires a team effort, companies must ensure that their infrastructure is secure and their users’ data is protected.

The major cloud security risks are loss of sensitive data, violation of existing regulatory controls, malware infections, hacked interfaces, permanent data loss, degradation of cloud service, insider threat, accounts takeover, and more.

Thus, when deploying cloud computing projects, security must be considered as one of the most significant issues. And it requires enterprises to spot and comprehend the potential risks inherent to digitization, public networks and outsourcing of infrastructure components.

Data Security in Cloud

Cloud migration is not as easier as it promises a range of benefits to businesses. Shifting to a cloud environment always requires cognizant responsibility pertaining to data security as data with various levels of sensitivity is moving out of the confines of a user’s firewall.

So, safeguarding and ensuring data securing while migrating to the cloud, businesses need to consider some critical security measures.

Data Integrity

Typically, data integrity paves ways toward safeguarding data from unauthorized deletion, alteration, or fabrication. Managing entity's access and rights to specific enterprise resources ensure that treasured data and services are not abused, plundered, or compromised. Data integrity is easily accomplished in a standalone system with a single database as it is maintained through database constraints and transactions, which is often achieved by a database management system.

Data Encryption

It is very significant and crucial to making the privacy of private or confidential data while storing it in the cloud. This requires authentication and access control strategies in order to ensure data confidentiality. Since the high volume of data stored on the cloud, which requires an internet connection to store this data, users using cloud services is potentially vulnerable to cyberattacks. Thus, there is a need for simple encryption that offers double security layers as the files will have to be decrypted to gain access.

Data Availability

Data availability while moving to the cloud is imperative as the data will be stored on someone else’s servers. It is also essential when accidents like hard disk damage, IDC fire, and network failures befall, so the extent that users’ data can be used or recovered and verified by techniques instead of relying on the credit guarantee by cloud service providers alone. Cloud service providers must ensure data security, particularly data confidentiality and integrity by sharing all such concerns with the client and build trust in this connection. They should also provide guarantees of data safety and elucidate jurisdiction of local laws to the clients.

Data Privacy

One of the most issues with data privacy is most cloud providers may store data on servers not physically located in a region that puts customers with full liability in the event of a breach. The privacy means in a cloud environment when users visit the sensitive data, the cloud services can thwart potential adversary from inferring the user's behavior by the user's visit model. For this scenario, researchers have developed an Oblivious RAM (ORAM) technology, which visits several copies of data to conceal the real visiting aims of users. The technology has been largely leveraged in software protection and data privacy in the cloud.