Enhance your cloud storage security and data protection


Most entrepreneurs around the world are adopting cloud storage due to its scalability, accessibility, and less IT overhead, making it cheaper.As cloud storage grows more popular, cloud storage security has become an urgent topic. It's a topic that businesses realize can prove challenging. Creating a set of best practices that ensures data security presents a broad array of issues and risks.That’s because cloud storage revolves around anywhere, anytime access to data and encompasses a broader set of users, applications and data sources. Even if a cloud isn’t breached, it’s possible for hackers to break into individual accounts on Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive and other cloud storage providers. Cloud-based storage is convenient these days for many businesses to adopt. After all, these cloud storage vendors offer unmatched operational agility, velocity, efficiency, flexibility and productivity in their services. However, just like with any other technologies out there, there are benefits and drawbacks.


Enterprises turn to cloud storage solutions to solve a variety of problems. Small businesses use the cloud to cut costs. IT specialists turn to the cloud as the best way to store sensitive data. One of the most critical aspects of cloud security is to ensure that only authorized personnel such as you and your employees have access to the documents and files stored in the cloud. Ultimately, the responsibility of securing your cloud lies between you and the cloud storage vendor. If you do eventually plan to adopt cloud storage for your business, it is imperative that you take measures to protect your data through secure passwords and two-factor authentication, as well as to limit and control access to others finding your sensitive data.

Types of Cloud: Public, Private, Hybrid
There are three types of cloud solutions.
Each of these offers a unique combination of advantages and drawbacks:
  • Public Cloud: These services offer accessibility and security. This security is best suited for unstructured data, like files in folders. Most users don’t get a great deal of customized attention from public cloud providers. This option is affordable.
  • Private Cloud: Private cloud hosting services are on-premises solutions. Users assert unlimited control over the system. Private cloud storage is more expensive. This is because the owner manages and maintains the physical hardware.
  • Hybrid Cloud: Many companies choose to keep high-volume files on the public cloud and sensitive data on a private cloud. This hybrid approach strikes a balance between affordability and customization.


What’s new with Cloud Storage security

- Uniform bucket-level access for Cloud IAM

Cloud Storage’s support for Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM) enables you to apply access policies by role to Cloud Storage users, along with other Google Cloud products. The new uniform bucket-level access feature lets you uniformly configure access through Cloud IAM Policies to your Cloud Storage resources, allowing for manageability at scale. When it’s enabled on a bucket, only bucket-level Cloud IAM permissions grant access to that bucket and the objects it contains.

- Hash-based message authentication (HMAC) for Cloud Storage service accounts

You can now manage and use hash-based message authentication (HMAC) credentials associated with Cloud Storage service accounts, rather than user accounts. This feature strengthens your authentication and security by not having to rely on credentials tied to the user accounts. This feature also lets you interoperate seamlessly among multiple cloud vendors with regard to security and authentication setups and practices.

- V4 signature support with Cloud Storage

We are happy to announce the GA launch of V4 signature support with Cloud Storage. This is a critical multi-cloud security capability for our customers and partners. V4 signature capability enables customers to generate signed URLs (also referred to as pre-signed URLs) with limited permissions and duration, which they can issue to their clients/users who don’t need to have a Google identity. Signature-based authentications, especially through signed URLs, is a very common security posture used for content storage and delivery, SaaS platforms and applications, and analytics (enterprise data warehouses and analytics pipelines). You can take a look at a signature-based multimedia content storage and distribution setup example here.

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