The Future of Data Security - Cloud Tokenization

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are just a few of the pioneers of what we call the “cloud”. The “cloud” is based on a CDN (Content Delivery Network), which in its most raw form is a distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers to give users access to network data in milliseconds.   Global spending on cloud based applications has risen 20% in 2014. This “cloud” based revolution has led us to aPaas (Application Service as a Platform), demonstrating that cloud based services are the way of the future.

aPaaS (Application Service as a Platform) is revolutionizing the way businesses handle information inside/outside of their data environment. As an IT planner and architect, what key performance indicators are you using to select your provider? Are you using the correct indicators to gauge what your company needs, or are you using a generic set that you found online somewhere? Even though the service is outsourced, there’s still responsibility for maintaining that presence.  Who’s going to manage this service now?  Are the SLA’s (Service Level Agreement) in-line with what you currently have in place both internally and externally for partners and customers?

Internal Challenges on aPaaS

Moving your critical data to the cloud has its own set of internal challenges. Control of your Data, Internal Politics (It’s our data, should live with us), External Impressions (no one is going to run your company like you), Integration issues (does this service blend with your current data environment?), Uptime (What is the speed?), and most importantly, Trust (Does the service provide security?) are the major issues that need to be addressed. All of these issues must be satisfied with the aPaas offering.

Getting started, IT planners must first focus on the cost benefit analysis of moving services to the cloud. The internal politics of wanting to keep data in house comes with added risk and compliance costs. Then, determine Local data management vs. distributed management. Flexibility and Access to your data will help you determine local versus distributed. Moreover, define the critical systems you need to keep in house, and what systems you can safely push to the cloud.  For example, you can push your payroll to the cloud as you don’t want to administer a piece of software and server for it, but you may be reluctant to push your revenue generating eCommerce site to the cloud.

Since the cloud requires a large degree of automation and standardized settings, by nature, it’s more reasonable to trust the ability of a company to quickly recover from catastrophe or quickly scale up at the same or a different cloud host provider.  This is in contrast to a local company attempting to recreate what they had locally somewhere else.

Long-Term Benefits

·      Large distributed server infrastructure absorbs attack traffic

·      Reduce overhead on technology infrastructure

·      Increased ability to focus on core competencies

·      Globalize your workforce by allowing international access to your data

·      Reduced costs in lifecycle of hardware(3 years)

·      Minimize software licenses

·      Distributing Endpoints closer to customers

·      Speed to Market

Security Threats

Data Breaches & Data Loss are the largest threats in cloud based applications. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks) are on the rise using fragmented IP packets with a fixed payload. Feedly, Evernote, and Deezer all admitted to DDoS attacks, but were up and running in the same week. Feedly turned to Cloudfare to restore their services. Cyberthieves use different reflection attacks in which an attacker delivers traffic to the victim of their attack by reflecting it off of a third party so that the origin of the attack is concealed from the victim. These attacks can be greatly mitigated with cloud credit card tokenization.

Cloud Tokenization as a Security Solution

Why store sensitive data environment when it is not necessary? Cloud tokenization as an aPaas overcomes all of those challenges with:  

·      SSAE16 SOC2, SOC3 certifications

·      TSP-Tokenization Certification

·      PCI DSS compliant

Tokenization replaces the sensitive data with a value that is unrelated to the original data set. There are multiple token formats to tokenize any and all sensitive information. By using common interfaces, SOAP and REST TokenEx bridges this gap; EVERYONE can use the HTTP protocol. TokenEx allows customer control over your token types and control over your access to our portal.