Cloud Hosting has taken everyone in the website hosting business by storm. This is because of numerous advantages of this form of hosting such as large storage space, bandwidth, and affordable price. It refers to such a hosting environment in which several servers complete the requirement of resources of a single website. The biggest advantage of this form of hosting is that a site will never have to be shut down for maintenance purposes.

Microsoft Azure is a popular cloud platform which is used by numerous organizations to host their sites. Azure is particularly useful for global enterprises which need to maintain websites catering to different regions and can’t afford even a second of downtime. Developers can build such applications which can run in the cloud by using services like Live Services, SQL Azure and SharePoint.

Microsoft has remained ahead of its competitors in this field due to its high quality services. However, some concerns relating to security aspect of hosting with Microsoft Azure have cropped up in the recent past. This has prompted Microsoft to provide some Cloud security tips for safe hosting of websites.

• Usage of multiple storage keys: In fact, key management is an important part of security of cloud hosting. Apart from using multiple storage keys, it is recommended that in order to prevent misuse of keys advanced encryption methods should be used. The access keys need to be unique for each customer for avoiding intentional or unintentional access to data that belongs to others.
• A gatekeeper design pattern needs to be followed so as to isolate privileged access.
• The web roles need to be isolated and individual roles need to have separate roles and responsibilities.
• Usage of *servicename*.cloudapp.net needs to be replaced with that of a custom domain. This is to ensure that the cloud remains separated from the enterprise space.