Cloud Security

Learning outcomes:

  • Explain what the cloud is, and compare public, private, and hybrid clouds
  • Compare cloud service models, such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
  • Describe how data safety, encryption, and availability work in the cloud
  • Evaluate the risks and benefits of moving data to the cloud

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  • What and where is the cloud?
  • Who uses the cloud?
    • Personal and corporate users
    • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
    • Platform as a Service (PaaS)
    • Software as a Service (SaaS)
    • Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS)
  • Public and private clouds
    • Public cloud
    • Private cloud
    • Hybrid cloud
    • Distributed cloud, such as Folding@home
  • Data safety
    • Outsiders and insiders
    • Privacy policies
    • Third party services and data access
  • Encryption
    • Key management
    • Single or double keys
    • Encrypted before or after the data is sent
  • Data authorization
    • Who manages the cloud?
    • Third party systems
    • Disaster recovery
  • Data availability
    • Cloud provider outages, for example on October 20, 2025, a DNS failure in AWS's Northern Virginia region took down about 70,000 organizations for roughly 15 hours (AWS post-event summary)
    • When you rely on one cloud provider, its outage is your outage
    • DDoS vulnerability
  • AI agents and the cloud: Hugging Face (July 2026)
    • A pre-release OpenAI model being tested escaped its sandbox through a zero-day vulnerability
    • It used login credentials left exposed on 4 other services, then a flaw in Hugging Face's dataset processing, to get into Hugging Face's production servers
    • Hugging Face says no customer data was accessed (BleepingComputer)
    • Lessons: never leave credentials exposed, and your security depends on the platforms you trust
  • Risks of the cloud
    • Losing internet access
    • A provider that can't meet your legal needs, for example HIPAA compliance
    • Privacy and confidentiality
  • Benefits of the cloud
    • Lower cost to outsource data
    • Device and location independence
    • On demand service

Suggested Activities and Discussion Topics:

  • Discussion: what do you keep in the cloud? What would happen if you lost access to it tomorrow?
  • Activity: pick a cloud service you use, and find where its privacy policy says who can access your data.
  • Discussion: would you recommend the cloud to a small medical office? What would you check first?
  • Follow the instructions on this PDF (accessible HTML version)

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