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Information Security Tips Series |
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After the introduction of cloud computing in a previous issue, we should now have a basic understanding of what it is. In fact, one of the concepts of cloud computing is VIRTUALIZATION. You might have learned about the funding approval by the Legislative Council in May this year for our 'Virtual Workstation' project. The project will be rolled out in Kowloon West region as pilot in 2012. What's 'Virtualization'?
Virtualization refers to hardware and software partitioning, time-sharing (with a central processing system to simultaneously provide services to users), and machine simulation and emulation to divide system resources into several computing environments. Some examples of virtual environments are listed below: 1. Storage Virtualization - cloud service providers partition the physical storage space (such as hard disk) into a number of logical spaces, for sharing among users through the Internet. 2. Application Virtualization - to build applications on top of a virtual environment for users to run without having to install or download programmes. Users can easily use the applications as long as the computer has Internet access. 3. Operating System Virtualization - service providers set up one or more virtual machines (such as Windows, Mac OS, Linux, etc.) running on top of a physical server. This method can reduce hardware costs and utilize the system resources efficiently. Moreover, users can install applications on virtual machines to establish effective testing or production platform, improve and execute the related applications. When you are using cloud computing software and application services, have you considered the possibility of leakage of personal or police information? By using the third-party cloud computing platforms to handle confidential information, hackers may deploy a malicious code within the virtual machine or operating interface in the cloud environment to share computing resources to users, and then capture the user information and activity. Also, hackers may steal the contents of other companies' virtual machines and interfere with the operation of virtual machines via "Cross-Virtual Machine (VM) attack", thus causing service interruption. Therefore, in using the cloud computing technology, users should take into account the importance of information security. In using cloud application services, please consider the following: 1) Use of trusted sites and applications There are many cloud computing software and application services on the Internet. To be on the safe side, do verify whether this is a trusted web site. If you download an application to your smart phone or computer, the application should be chosen from a trusted source as well. It is because hackers would embed a malicious code or backdoor onto the application for users to download, in order to steal user's information from the smart phone or computer. 2) Avoid posting your whereabouts and uploading confidential information Almost all smart phones are equipped with camera, which allows users to take photo anytime, for real-time upload to share with others. Before you share your photos, have you carefully read the details of the photo? Are there any confidential documents, operation instruction or personal information on the background of photos? 3) Perform data backup regularly Since most Cloud applications are free of charge to users, service quality is not guaranteed. When the server is overloaded or malfunctions, this would lead to data loss. If it could not be recovered, the greatest loss would be users like us. Regular data backup is, therefore, an important tool to prevent data loss. Is the Force's "Virtual Workstation" safe?
While deploying the virtualization technology, the Force's 'Virtual Workstation' architecture is built upon our Intranet to provide the storage, applications and operating systems virtualization. This design would take advantage of the convenience and security features of virtualization, and at the same time would avoid the safety issues concerning cloud computing that we raised above. |
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