How to Keep Your Business Secure When Using the Cloud

The role of cloud-based technology is growing every day, both in terms of our individual lives and in the way we do business.  While the benefits of using the cloud are wide ranging, easily the biggest concern surrounds keeping data secure. With the use of cloud platforms set to increase further in 2013, there will be more to keep safe and more due diligence to be carried out than ever before.

We explored how you can keep your business secure by effectively managing everything in your cloud space in the coming year.

Don’t Rely on Firewalls

Place whatever you are keeping in the cloud, whether that is data, server processes, or web hosting functions, behind a firewall. The mistake, however, would be then to think everything is okay, and not carry out any further monitoring.

As good as firewalls can be for preventing attacks and viruses, they are not infallible, and leaving them unmonitored will inevitably lead to a breach eventually. Combine technology and an element of human IT management in order to get the best results.

Get Service Guarantees

Some of the service guarantees you will seek from your cloud provider are obvious. For example, it goes without saying that you will want to be able to access your data securely and quickly wherever you are, and whenever you want.

Many companies that use a cloud service make the mistake of thinking they are the only clients using a particular space. If you have paid for a private cloud service, get a written guarantee that you are the only group that can access it. Some cloud providers will ‘re-sell’ your space if you leave a significant chunk of it unused, which could lead to others accessing your data and leave you at risk. Be sure to take this possibility out of the equation.

Have a Back Up Plan

Even if you have a stringent policy in place, have a firewall and a human set of eyes on your cloud operation and performance at all times, and believe you are the only person with access to the data, you can still be open to an attack and lose some of your data.

Keep an action plan active at all times, so that any data is backed up elsewhere, and have a clear idea of timescales when it comes to dealing with any breaches or restoring services. Part of this will be down to you, although your corrective actions are better to be planned in conjunction with your service provider, especially if you can get them board with carrying out security monitoring on your behalf.

Make it a Big Thing

Anyone who suffers any data security breach of any kind, not just in terms of cloud computing, does so for several reasons. One common factor shared by everyone this happens to, is that they have not made it a big deal in their organisation.

Whether you are a one man company or are responsible for a team of employees, ensure cloud security is high on the agenda on a daily basis, and something that everyone in your business lives by day in, day out.

Keep yourself secure on the cloud throughout 2013 and beyond, and you will soon find yourself well positioned to make full use of its great potential.

This post is from Posterita where my colleagues are working,  is revolutionary new inventory management software that allows chain stores and single stores to manage every aspect of their operations via an easy-to-use web-based platform.

EC2 Micro Instances - Best Among AWS Cloud

Micro instance (t1.micro) type is one of the most fashionable and highly acceptable instance types by IT fellows supported by Amazon EC2. During November 2010, AWS announced the free tier and started offering 750 hours of Micro Instance usage free per month for the first one year, but it's available as an Amazon EBS-backed instance only. You can now launch EC2 micro instances within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). AWS now extends to t1.micro instances running inside of a VPC also.

Talking to it technical specifications, the Micro Instance type doesn’t have that much power required for heavy stimulating. The main memory presented in Micro instance type is 613MB. It comes with explode CPU capacity that can be goes up to 2 Elastic Compute Units (ECU). That means the CPU performance is not conventional. This is just not enough for running any severe workloads. And yes, storage can be added through Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and the free tier covers up to 30GB of storage space.

But from the technical specification it doesn’t mean Micro Instances are totally ineffective. They offer excellent worth in certain cases. In this article, I want to share how to get the best out of the Amazon EC2 Micro Instances.

Optimize Swap Memory – This is pertinent to Linux based Micro Instances. By default, these types of instances do not have swap space configured at initial level. I ran my Cloud Magic World Website on a Micro Instance for a few days. During the crest loads, I have experienced Apache Server or MySQL crashing unexpectedly. So with just 613 MB at your clearance, you got to make sure that you have set aside enough disk space for the swap. This will radically enlarge the reliability of Micro Instance.

Auto Scaling Out – The funda on the Cloud is auto scaling out. Running a convoy of low-end servers in parallel is more competent and cost effectual on any virtualized infrastructure. As per the load and use-case, splitting a job across number of Micro Instances may be cheaper and faster than running the same job on a single Large Instance. This scale out structural design provides better fail over and quicker processing.

Mull over Caching – If you are scheduling to host sites on these Micro Instances, be clear in your mind that they are not very dynamic. Dynamic websites demand more CPU power and memory due to the approach each request is processed. Straightforward websites like blogs and marketing sites with a few dynamic contents are ideal participants for the Micro Instances. Moreover, consider caching the content to avoid CPU spikes. For example, if you are running any blog or website, you can enable caching plug-ins to increase the performance. There are plenty of plug-ins available for caching by free of cost.

Select 64-bit – Always pick 64-bit when running Micro Instances. This is assured to give you better recital than the 32-bit complement. You will see the difference when you are running batch processing that deals with large files and processes.

Pull the Cron jobs – Many patrons operate a Linux Micro Instance to run cron jobs and precise locale tasks that monitor and handle their entire AWS infrastructure. If you want to run a cron job, stop all other running services, add swap space to instance and pull it to make it a tilt and mean cron job machine.

Summary:

Hope this article gave you the basic fundamentals to get best out of the Micro Instances. I have mentioned core advantages and use cases of EC2 micro instance type over here. From Best-of-breed, you can use micro instances for normal dynamic websites and contents with caching power and scaling advantage.