Why Segregation is Essential In the Cloud

Nothing wrong.

Data needs privacy and security.

Hence,

There is nothing wrong with Data segregation.

Smile. I hate bad grammar too.

In a previous post entitled, “Every Relationship Needs A Little SSL ,” we discussed the mechanism of how to achieve the integrity of your data.

Now we continue our series with how SSL works to provide a bridge to secure Data in the Cloud.

If you’re like me, you probably respect and revere Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But we both know that when it comes to our data, holding hands and singing Kumbaya is just not the route to take.

Not if you want to stay employed.

Back to that in a moment.

Did you know that there is an ongoing feud over who owns the rights to the Kumbaya lyrics. Frey claims he is the owner, but:

There is debate about the truth of Frey’s authorship claim; recent research has found that sometime between 1922 and 1931, members of an organization called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a song from the South Carolina coast. Come By Yuh, as they called it, was sung in Gullah, the Creole dialect spoken by the former slaves living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. In Gullah, “Kumbaya” means “Come by here”, so the lyric could be translated as “Come by here, my lord, come by here. Another version was preserved on a wax cylinder in May 1936 by Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of what became the American Folklife Center. Gordon discovered a woman named Ethel Best singing Come By Here with a group in Raiford, Florida

I think they were struggling with Data Segregation and Secure Access.

There are three elements for ensuring Data Segregation and Secure Access.

Encryption
Authentication
Certificate Validity

Encryption relaxes me because it insists that you should mind your own business. And that without the proper decryption tool, my business does not become yours without my permission.

But in the Cloud, all encryption is not equal.

Businesses should require that their cloud provider use a combination of SSL and servers that support, at minimum, 128-bit encryption.

But if you want to sleep well at night, go all out and use the stronger 256-bit encryption.

Additionally businesses should also demand that server ownership be authenticated before one iota of data transfers between servers.

But be careful,

Self-assigned SSL certificates provide no authentication. Take Michelle Pfieffer’s advice from Scarface.

‘Don’t get high on your own supply.’

Only, independent, third-party SSL certificates delivers legitimate ownership authentication. This makes it impossible to establish a rogue server that can infiltrate the cloud provider’s environment.

Furthermore, as far as certificate validity is concerned, once a server and domain are authenticated, the SSL certificate issued to that device will be valid for a defined length of time.

In the rare case that an SSL certificate has been compromised in some way, there is a fail-safe check to verify that the certificate has not been revoked in the time since it was originally issued. Every time an SSL handshake is initiated, the SSL certificate is checked against a current database of revoked certificates.

In life and especially in the Cloud, you must check what you expect.