White Paper Proposal for Cloud Computing and Data Encryption Application

White Paper Project
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White Paper Project
The digital age in which Chinese courier services operate is powered by customer data. Most postal companies operating in China collect customer data through assent and transparency to create value for their consumers and provide personalized services. The data may include unique personal information or what is referred to as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII refers to data that can employed to identify a person’s identity like their name, ID number, email address, telephone number, physical address, or any other demographic, health, and financial detail that is unique to that individual. PII is particularly attractive to hackers who can sell the information on the black market or use it to carry out various criminal activities such as social engineering attacks, fraud, or even identity theft. Companies handling PII therefore need to protect their databases from breaches which often result in litigation, heavy regulatory fines, as well as loss of customer trust and brand reputation. Besides protecting PII, companies must also safeguard their firmographic and technograhic data. This white paper proposes several ways Chinese postal company can protect company and customer PII from data breaches using cloud computing encryption.
Cloud computing provides various tools and applications for storing and protecting data from theft, distortion, or deletion. Instead of storing data on physical storage data, business can save and secure their data online and access it from any location. It is a popular option for companies handling big data because of its cost savings, speed and efficiency, security, productivity, and performance. Cloud computing provides larger storage spaces, an efficient off-site data back-up solution, and allows the faster processing of information. Because of its widespread use, cloud security is a major concern for companies handling PII. Some of the biggest security concerns are data breaches, insecure program interfaces (API), account hijacking, data loss, malware injection, and service traffic hijacking. All these concerns threaten the integrity, confidentiality, privacy, and availability of company and customer PII. It is therefore important for companies to protect their cloud data from external attacks. The figure below shows the organization of data security and privacy in cloud computing.


(Sun, Zhang, & Xiong, 2014)
One of the best ways of protecting company and customer PII when using cloud storage is data encryption. Cloud data encryption is the process of encoding data before transferring it to cloud storage. Most cloud service providers provide a broad array of encryption services from encrypted connection to limited encryption of personal data as well as encryption keys to decrypt the data.
It is important for postal companies controlling PII to encrypt their data before uploading it. However, the company must first conduct an inventory of its database to determine what classifies as sensitive data and how what level of encryption should be employed to protect it. After completing an inventory of company and cust...