Cloud Security and Risk

Running head: CLOUD SECURITY AND RISK
Cloud Security and Risk
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CLOUD SECURITY AND RISK
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
Case Study..............................................................................................................................3
1. Security of Employee Data................................................................................................4
1.1 Existing Threats and Risks for Data Security in HR Database....................................4
1.2 Additional Risks and Threats after SaaS Migration.....................................................5
1.3 Severity of Risks and Threats in Employee Data.........................................................6
2. Privacy of Employee Data.................................................................................................8
2.1 Existing Threats and Risks for Data Privacy in HR Database.....................................8
2.2 Additional Risks and Threats after SaaS Migration.....................................................9
2.3 Severity of Risks and Threats in Employee Data.......................................................10
3. Digital Identities Issues....................................................................................................11
4. Provider Solutions Issues.................................................................................................12
5. Data Sensitivity................................................................................................................13
Conclusion................................................................................................................................14
References................................................................................................................................17

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CLOUD SECURITY AND RISK
Introduction
Cloud computing is the major concept of IT, which solely and eventually enables the
vast accessing of every type of the collective pool of configurable system resource and the
high level service (Arora, Parashar & Transforming, 2013). These services could be quickly
provisioned with extremely lesser effort of organization with the connectivity of Internet. The
technology mainly relies on the various types of resource sharing for the purpose of achieving
the economy of scale as well as coherence, which is absolutely similar to public utilities. The
respective third party cloud is responsible for allowing the companies for focusing over their
major businesses instead of spending resources on the computer maintenance and
infrastructures (Dinh et al., 2013). The most important benefit of this particular technology is
that it allows the organizations in avoiding or minimizing the upfront IT infrastructure costs.
Cloud computing has the availability of the higher capacity networks, lower cost systems and
storage device. Moreover, the hardware virtualization, utility computing and service oriented
architecture are also utilized in this technology. The major characteristics of cloud computing
are the improvement of organizational agility, cost effectiveness, independence of devices
and locations, maintenance of the applications of cloud computing, multi tenancy, better
performance, resource pooling, increment in productivity, business continuity and disaster
recovery, high reliability, scalability, elasticity, data security and privacy and many others
(Hashem et al., 2015). The three cloud computing services are the Infrastructure as a Service
or IaaS, Platform as a Service or PaaS and Software as a Service or SaaS.
The following report explains a short discussion on the case study of Charity. There is
a small data centre with Windows Server 2008 R2 and other web services. They have
considered joining any community cloud that is being provided by the vendor of public cloud
to provide several applications to the 500 staffs and administrative users. The confidential

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CLOUD SECURITY AND RISK
data or information is required to be secured with the help of cloud computing technology.
This report will be outlining the various and probable risks or threats to the data within the
HR database. Moreover, the risks of data after the migration of SaaS will also be provided
here. The privacy and security of data is being checked by these risks. The possible risks to
the digital identities of the charity employees for SaaS migration and issues related to ethics
will also be given here.
Discussion
Case Study
Charity is a community that is involved for locating as well as providing
accommodation, services for the mental health, and the services of training or support to all
types of disadvantaged people within this community. This community mainly runs a small
centre of data, which comprises of some 50 x 86 bit server running. The servers are database,
file services and Windows Server 2008 R2 for the desktop services. The confidentiality of the
collected PII data of the Charity is maintained eventually and these data even involves some
of the digital identities for the disadvantaged clients (Fernando, Loke & Rahayu, 2013). The
Board of the Charity is concerned regarding the security and privacy of the sensitive and
confidential data so that no data breach occurs within the community. They have taken the
decision for purchasing a HR and personnel management application from an American
organization, which provides SaaS solution. Moreover, they also wish to move the payroll of
the charity to a Commercial Off The Shelf or COTS application for managing within the
public cloud and moving their intranet to a Microsoft SharePoint PaaS for providing intranet
services to all the agencies in WofG.