Securing your backup data in the cloud by Jay Livens

Cloud technology is frequently in the news and there is no doubt that it can provide meaningful benefits. However, these technologies also bring the question of security to the forefront. The real concern is how does your risk change when servers or information are hosted either physically or virtually in the cloud? Risks associated with publicly accessible servers and data were discussed in a recent blog post at CSOOnline entitled Are you sure you're really in control of your servers? . The article provides some eyeopening examples of real world security challenges. The discussion also made me think about cloud backup and the potential risks associated with retaining data.

As discussed in the article, any information accessible via the Internet is at risk of exposure regardless of whether it is stored in a private server in your data center or on a public server. The same challenges apply to backup and users must consider the risks associated with both the backup agent running on servers and the security of the underlying provider infrastructure. Service providers have developed specific technologies to address these challenges and let's consider some different ways to implement security in a cloudy backup infrastructure.

Outbound-only connections: Some solutions protect you by not requiring ports on the firewall to be opened. Communications are initiated from the servers being protected to the cloud servers directly and thus there is no need to open firewall or server ports to the public Internet.

Encryption for authentication: One risk is that a hacker could connect to a server pretending to be a client. In order to address this challenge, clients and servers should use unique authentication certificates to validate each other's identity when connecting.

Customer controlled encryption keys: Customers want to know that their information is protected and secure from unauthorized viewing by any third party. Ideally, the solution should allow customers to create and maintain their own unique encryption keys that are unavailable to any third party including the cloud backup provider.

Encryption key modification: Having a custom encryption key as described above is critical, but is not enough. People and policies change and so the ability to change encryption keys periodically is important to maintain security or to react to potential disks. Ideally you should be able to change your encryption for all your data while maintaining your retained information and not have to perform all new backups.

Secure transmission: As information is communicated between the client and server, you must be sure that it is transmitted in a secure and encrypted fashion. This process should leverage technologies like SSL to secure data as it traverses the public Internet.

While no technology solution is immune from every current and future hacking attempt, these five key technologies can go a long way towards address the vast majority of cloud backup security risks. You should ask any provider you are considering whether they offer these technologies and if not, how they address the underlying data risk. Iron Mountain's Server Backup offering fully supports these technologies and extends the protection to include hosting servers in a secure underground facility.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2013/service-lines/data-backup-and-recov...
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