I have watched the database management industry for a long time. Years of experience in this field have made me more experienced. I have seen the trends, when I started in 2008 until now when I share an office with 120 people. From those days of server-side database management, we have now moved to database in the cloud. Recently, a popular site, famous for sharing files through the torrent network, announced that it will move entirely to the cloud infrastructure and will no longer have a physical server.
This brings up another issue that is troubling me recently. Is the cloud server a safe option? It is certainly still developing and has not reached its full potential. Personally, I predict that we would see a cloud server architecture outperforming the current one in 2020 and surely not before. There are two great reasons in favor of this opinion.
1. Architecture has not yet reached its peak, it is still in its development stage and many companies and organizations distrust it.
2. There is too much data to move. Imagine that some large organizations like Google or Yahoo try to move to the “cloud”. They will need to move thousands of terabytes.
Anyway, data security is what I’m willing to talk about today. Cloud technology, as I pointed out several times, is not fully functional, which means there are potential holes in security. But this point also works as a boon as no hacker is really targeting cloud technology at this early stage of development because there are so few companies using this technology. This is exactly why Linux is safe, no hacker will go out of his way to penetrate an operating system with a 2% market share. But there may still be some threats.
‘Thumb sucking’, as it is somewhat strangely called, is the process in which people can physically access the target machine. They can take out the data using portable storage devices like a flash device. This risk is greatly reduced by using cloud infrastructure. Since most of the data will be in the cloud, physical access to an access point will not do as much damage as it used to to the existing system. But it also increases the second risk, known as HACKING!
The chances of piracy increase. Let me explain you with a simple example. If there is only one door to enter a room, you can easily focus on providing maximum security to that door. But what if there are a thousand doors, all with different locks and keys? It will be difficult for the most efficient floor manager to ensure maximum security as easily as it would have done in the case of a door. This is what happens when you opt for cloud hosting. You have difficulty locating your data, forget to protect it. I am not saying that there are no architectures that can take care of it, but simply the fact that there will be more doors, closed or not, means that there will be more possibilities for intruders to enter. This flaw must be addressed very soon and seriously to nullify this threat to the greatest extent possible.
Personally, I look forward to cloud computing, as enthusiastically as the web-based operating system.