Encrypted cloud storage comparison

by Christopher Prüfer Web hosting expert

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An encrypted cloud hosting — what does that mean?

The importance of IT security and data security is steadily increasing: attacks by cybercriminals on servers and users rise year on year, and with many activities moving to the home office and the use of cloud services, the number of potential targets grows at the same time. It is now standard that data transmission is encrypted, yet many users shy away from the additional effort when it comes to storage. This makes it particularly important when cloud hosting is encrypted. However, this term can have several meanings.

What does it mean when cloud hosting is encrypted?

Access to websites today is almost exclusively via the HTTPS protocol, which, however, only protects data in transit. The connection between a client and an online presence never happens directly, but via several nodes (gateways) and servers that forward the packets. Up until the second decade of the 21st century it was not a given, even for large corporations such as Facebook, that communications were protected from eavesdropping by third parties. Today, data protection legislation requires all companies to prevent unauthorised access to connections by SSL certificates. In addition to this basic protection, it is also important to ensure the data security of stored information. Basically, three different methods are available:

• Encryption by the web host, e.g. through at-rest encryption
• Manual encryption by the client
• Automated encryption by client-side applications

Different procedures can be used to ensure that cloud hosting is encrypted. A key distinction is whether encryption is performed by the customer or the provider, with both variants having their own advantages and disadvantages. In the first case, encryption takes place automatically or manually before data transfer, so that no one except the local holder of the appropriate key has access to the stored information. If the host encrypts the cloud hosting, it is usually an at-rest encryption, which encrypts and decrypts data on write and read using a secure cryptographic method, so that the corresponding files are not stored in plaintext.

What risks do data that are encrypted in cloud hosting pose?

If data stored by cloud hosting is encrypted, this necessarily means the provider must hold the corresponding key in order to write to and make it readable. From this arise several vulnerabilities, the most important of which is certainly that, after a successful attack, criminals can find and use the keys. To prevent this, reputable providers store them on a special, highly secured Dedicated Server. This offers protection against a partial attack on individual websites, but not if cybercriminals infiltrate an entire network and escalate their privileges in a targeted way. When information is encrypted by cloud hosting, this neither affects data transmission nor necessarily means greater data protection or better data security. However, it does prevent abuse when criminals take over individual servers and significantly raises the barrier to unauthorised access.

What does it mean when the client encrypts data themselves?

In general, the most secure approach is when information is encrypted locally. This means the required key exists only on site, so data transmission together with HTTPS is doubly protected and both data protection and data security are significantly increased. However, private IT devices are often less well protected than commercial dedicated servers or VPS hosting, and losing the key means all information is irretrievably lost. Some professional applications, for example in medicine, include integrated and automated encryption procedures to ensure a high level of data protection. Here it depends on the vendor whether information can be manually decrypted and how migration between different programmes or from one piece of hardware to another is handled.

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