At a Glance
DIY cloud setups often create hidden vulnerabilities through misconfigurations, weak authentication, and poor maintenance. BlackBox Hosting’s private managed cloud protects enterprises with proactive monitoring, layered Fortinet security, and 99.999% uptime, helping organisations avoid costly breaches, maintain consumer trust, and meet rising cloud security requirements.
Growing Vulnerabilities, Growing Cloud Security Requirements
From the M&S and Co-op breaches to JLR’s cyber attack, the growing number of devastating cyber incidents is capturing everyone’s attention and concern. While UK organisations are keen to avoid being the next victim, it’s also important to understand the recurring theme behind such incidents.
Building and controlling your own cloud environment is empowering, however, without the right infrastructure and security, it can be filled with unexpected hurdles. Only seasoned cloud solutions providers like BlackBox Hosting can fully understand cloud security requirements and complexities that a DIY cloud computing setup can’t.
In this guide, we explore why the move to the cloud alone doesn’t automatically guarantee security and how DIY cloud storage servers can potentially open the door to catastrophic consequences.
What is DIY Cloud Computing?
DIY cloud computing follows a “do-it-yourself” approach of building and managing your own in-house IT infrastructure, either on-premise or through a colocation data centre. It involves purchasing servers, storage, software, and networking equipment while also handling all the security and maintenance tasks.
While a DIY cloud storage server offers you total control over your cloud hosting and application lifecycle, it also brings many cloud risks and challenges that you may not have anticipated.
Common DIY Cloud Risks and Challenges
Here are some of the most common security risks you might face with DIY cloud computing or self-hosting:
1. Misconfigured Services
In a DIY cloud setup, you may likely leave a default setting unchanged or miss a critical configuration option. These poorly configured settings can leave your data exposed to the internet and open to unauthorised access.
2. Weak Authentication
Weak authentication controls let users access data they shouldn’t. Not implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA) or using weak passwords can make it easier for attackers to gain access to your systems.
3. Lack of Encryption
Failing to encrypt data at rest or not using HTTPS for web services exposes your sensitive data to theft.
4. Network Exposure
Setting up your firewalls or routers incorrectly or inadequately leaves your business vulnerable and exposed to network-focused attacks, including DoS and DDoS.
5. Inadequate Backups
Backups are your safety net when things go wrong unexpectedly. Without comprehensive backup strategies, you risk losing all your information due to human errors, ransomware attacks or in the event of a hardware failure.
6. Outdated Software
With DIY cloud computing, you’re tasked with handling all the ongoing maintenance and upkeep of your systems, and it can be a challenge to keep your self-hosted software and services up-to-date. Outdated software contains vulnerabilities that attackers can easily exploit.
Why Moving to the Cloud Doesn’t Automatically Guarantee Security
Many businesses assume that migrating workloads to the cloud automatically moves all security responsibilities to the cloud provider. Operating your DIY cloud on this assumption can be catastrophic and here’s why:
Vendor-Client Responsibilities
A cloud setup often means shared responsibilities between the vendor and the customer. While the vendor secures the cloud infrastructure, it is up to the client to secure their configurations, identify management, access controls, and usage.
Misconfigured Cloud Infrastructure
Misconfigured cloud infrastructure is among the leading causes of cloud breaches. It’s easy for attackers to exploit excessive account permissions, exposed access keys, improper network segmentation, and open databases, caches, and storage buckets.
Sensitive Cloud Control Plane
The cloud control plane is the management control layer with the power to configure and manage cloud resources. Attackers can easily hijack your cloud when this sensitive layer is misconfigured.
A single misstep, like adding a new user with broad permissions and poorly regulated Identity and Access Management (IAM), can increase the risk of unrestricted, privileged access across your cloud estate and give them the control to overwrite security policies, locking you out or capturing your sensitive business data.
Why High-Security Organisations Need To Look Beyond Public Clouds
Public clouds are the obvious target for attackers, who look for open management endpoints, APIs, zero-day flaws, or exposed credentials. Finance, defence, healthcare, and legal businesses are high-risk industries that need superior security beyond IAM and MFA. Locking your control plane behind hardened gateways, continuous network monitoring, and strong firewalls are essential.
Armour Your Business with BlackBox Hosting’s Cloud Risk Management
As seasoned cloud experts in the industry, we know the impact and the cost of a cloud breach. Along with reputational damage, your business can face regulatory fines, compliance penalties, class action, and the expense of remediation, clean-up, and post-attack hardening.
This is why having an all-round, continuously managed, expert-backed cloud infrastructure is critical to any business. Businesses that rely on DIY cloud computing or an in-house generalist setup and treat cloud security as an afterthought often pay the price.
What your business needs is a robust, secure cloud infrastructure fulfilling the updated cloud security requirements with expert-backed, agile cybersecurity guidance.
Partner with us for our private and managed cloud hosting to gain:
- A bespoke cloud infrastructure tailored to your business needs
- Control of your resources in our UK-based Tier 3+ facility or your own data centre
- Ultra-secure next-gen layered security with Fortinet Next Gen firewalls
- Full DDoS and ransomware protection
- 99.999% network up-time guarantee
- BaaS and DRaaS
- 24/7 proactive network monitoring
- Round-the-clock expert support
Why wait for tomorrow’s headline to act? Call +44 (0)2037 407 840 to build the strongest defence today with BlackBox Hosting’s private managed cloud. Start your 30-day trial today.
