Extensive data is generated every day, which businesses may not store and manage accordingly or is expensive to do so. Cloud computing is a technology that covers a considerable expense that businesses could incur to handle large amounts of data. Additionally, cloud computing provides confidentiality, integrity, and data availability for organizations, making it easy to concentrate on other business needs rather than data management (Grobauer et al., 2010). However, since the cloud is now the source of most corporate data, hackers now focus on the cloud posing several could vulnerabilities. These breaches make the cloud a potential exposure to attacks.

Cloud vulnerable systems may suffer from misconfiguration vulnerabilities. Humans do cloud configuration, and it has been considered one of the most common vulnerabilities because of its self-inflicting nature. When securing the cloud, all the aspects or most of the security aspects have been put in place; however, during migration, inexperienced or lack of training of the personnel involved in the configuration can be problematic (Grobauer et al., 2010). The individuals may also lack an understanding of the shared cybersecurity model that makes the cloud vulnerable to attackers.

Cloud also suffers from poor access control vulnerability. Access control vulnerability is a prevalent cyberattack because of weak authentication or authorization strategies. Unauthorized uses can take advantage of poor access control around lack of authentication or the use of weak passwords to access cloud data (Grobauer et al., 2010). For example, attackers can take advantage of weak passwords and guess that allow them to access the data. However, when strong passwords are imposed on the cloud, it becomes difficult to intrusion the system. The most threatening problem is that an organization may store its data in the cloud, which can seriously impact the business when exposed.

Insecure APIs also form a breach of potential vulnerability in the cloud. APIs are integrated into the software to communicate with other software to complete a specific task. APIs allow unrelated software to communicate with other software without any knowledge of the internal operation of each other’s code. APIs enable access to critical information between software applications; in this case, they access organizational data and information (Kumar & Goyal, 2019). When APIs are implemented without adequate authentication, it breaches the cloud because it is available to the public, and anyone can access the data. In this case, anyone with intention with the data can compromise it and bring losses to the organization. Insecure APIs have brought threats to the organizational data in the cloud. Even when the cloud is secured, such vulnerabilities can be a problem because they allow accessibility (Kumar & Goyal, 2019). Besides, because these data are communicated over the internet, it becomes easy for anyone with internet access to access and compromise data. It is essential to impose strong authentication, data encryption, activity logging, and access control to the system to secure the cloud from vulnerabilities,

Therefore, the cloud is a potential vulnerability due to the ease of inaccessibility of the resources by third parties. In addition, misconfiguration vulnerabilities, access control vulnerability, and insecure APIs make the cloud vulnerable to attacks. With the massive and critical organizational data being stored and accessed through the cloud, securing the cloud is the only option to make it trustable again to users. However, it takes the efforts of individual organizations and the cloud computing infrastructure to secure the data and information.

References

Grobauer, B., Walloschek, T., & Stocker, E. (2010). Understanding cloud computing vulnerabilities. IEEE Security & privacy, 9(2), 50-57.

Kumar, R., & Goyal, R. (2019). On cloud security requirements, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures: A survey. Computer Science Review, 33, 1-48.