Implementation of Cloud Services in a Business Environment
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today’s demands for data protection and encryption. For performance reasons,
companies should desist from encryption of primary keys or indexed columns.
Encrypting a primary key would imply the encryption of all associated foreign keys
in the related table of the database as well, which further causes a decrease in
performance. The function of an indexed column (which is commonly used in
relational databases to access data quicker) would be reduced to absurdity when
encrypting it, causing slow queries. Particular companies that process Big Data
should use a columnar approach to encryption (Cloud Security Alliance, 2011, pp.
132-134).
A simple tool for encrypting files for cloud storage services is for example
BoxCryptor. The advantage of this tool is that it does not encrypt folders and inherits
the encryption to the files contained in this folder, but encrypts each file individually.
This does not only provide more security, but also increases the performance,
because just modified or updated files are transferred to the cloud provider
(
Reitmaier, 2013).
Another alternative is CloudFogger, which uses a 256bit AES algorithm to encrypt
files. The basic process is that the files are locally encrypted on-the-fly, which means
that the encryption process takes place in the background, while the user works with
a specific file. As soon as the process is finished, the filed are uploaded to the cloud
Provider and remain encrypted in the cloud. Whenever the user wants to access or
modify these files, a unique key is required to decrypt them (CloudFogger, 2012).
