This is the Should Highly Sensitive Data Be Stored in the Cloud work you have done a week
ago. Each reply must be at least 1 paragraph and 100 words in overall length. Each post must
address the original post and can either agree or disagree with the original poster's position. As
with the original post - support your arguments, but you are only required to have 1 supporting
argument and cite at least 1 external source for this reply.
Statement1:
Three policies that any organization should use to ensure data in the cloud remains private and
secure:

1. Educate employees on Cloud Security.
2. Encrypt data in transition and at rest.
3. Strengthen identify and access management (IAM)
   Organizations should educate employees on cloud security to avoid loss of sensitive information
   to unauthorized users due to human error. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report,
   24% of data breaches were caused by human error and seven out of ten employees are not
   adequately trained in cybersecurity awareness per MediPRO (Anonymous, 2020). I believe
   educating employees on how identify phishing attacks, differentiate secured from unsecured sites
   and encouraging them to install security software will mitigate the risk of losing sensitive data.
   The second policy that any organization should use to ensure data stored in the cloud is safe from
   cyber-attacks is encrypting data. Sensitive data in transit and at rest should be encrypted at all
   times (Pangam, 2017). This allows an organization to comply with privacy policies, regulatory
   and contractual obligations for handling sensitive information (Pangam, 2017). I believe
   encrypting data during transmission and at rest minimizes loss of sensitive data due to human
   error or cyber-attacks.
   The last policy that any organization should use to ensure data stored in the cloud remains
   private and secure involves strengthening identity and access management (IAM). IAM helps
   organization by streamlining and automating identify and access management and eliminates the
   need for IT team to manually assign access controls, monitor, update privileges or deleting
   accounts (Alvarenga, 2022). Additionally, organization can implement single sign-on to
   authenticate user’s identity and allow access to multiple application using one set of credentials
   (Alvarenga, 2022). Single sign-on would decrease the likelihood of password-related hacks and
   combining it with multi-factor authentication (MFA) would add an additional layer of security to
   the organization (McKeown, 2021). At my job, we use single sign-on, and MFA and I believe
   this policy safeguards my company’s sensitive data.
   As a citizen, we should be storing data with national security in the cloud. The world is
   changing, and as such, government agencies have to adapt and keep up with technological
   advances. I would suggest storing data on two servers: a private server and public server. The
   private server could be used to store highly classified information and the government will have
   control over this information under the control of an in-house IT team. Investing in cloud
   infrastructure is expensive so public server could come in handy to store additional information.
   I believe having both servers will minimize loss of sensitive data as it could be difficult for a
   cyber-attack to target both servers at the same time.
   Statment2:
   Cloud storage for data is certainly an important topic as companies race to find ways to increase
   storage capabilities while lowering costs. One of the most common hesitancies is the fact that
   this leaves the organization susceptible to attacks since they are creating a single point of
   vulnerability with many types of sensitive data. With that said, there are various policies that
   organizations can deploy to help prevent data breaches:

1 Review Access to Cloud Infrastructure- According to computer.org, one of the best ways to

prevent cloud computing attacks is by “monitoring, revoking, and limiting access to cloud
infrastructure” (Venugopal, 2022). This is important because an organization needs to keep tabs
on who is getting access to what and if someone is getting access that is not permitted, they can
mitigate the damages early with identifying a breach instantly.

2 Backing Up Data- Knowing that hacks on clouds do happen and ransomware can be

deployed to hold companies’ hostage, it is important to have a backup plan. Microsoft Azure has
a great backup system where its purpose is to create a product for organizations that is costeffective and secure. With their back up system, companies can select what data or applications
need to get backed up and they can manage this at scale (Microsoft Azure, n.d.).