Original Article: Information Week, Gerry Grealish
Enterprises are pushing more sensitive and regulated data into the public cloud than ever before. But the journey carries many new risks.
When thinking about protecting data in the cloud, there are three areas of use that security and privacy professionals need to consider: data in motion, data at rest and data in use. In a nutshell, the data leaves your environment and goes from to point A (your network) to B (the cloud); within point B it gets initially processed and stored within a database, and then is pulled out of that database for processing. Each of these phases carries risk:
- The first area, data in motion, is the most well known and understood. The goal of protecting data in motion is to prevent a third party from eavesdropping on a conversation on the transmission wire.
- The next key area, data at rest, is also relatively well understood. Data at rest is essentially the data that is stored persistently in some form, as a file, in a database, etc. The goal of protecting data at rest is to prevent a third party from reading the data, should they gain access to the data in its persistent form (for example, when an attacker gains access to the file system and opens or copies the files).
- Data in use is, effectively, the data that has been loaded into a process and is in the memory of the program that is running. In general, this data is in the clear while being processed and is typically not protected by techniques such as the in-cloud based encryption provided by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs).