How secure are cloud services?

Most IT professionals believe that cloud services are more secure than legacy un-premise systems. Cloud service providers tended to have larger budgets and more advanced security technologies to better protect the data and infrastructure entrusted to them.

As organizations have increasingly moved data and IT infrastructure to the cloud, cloud security has become a central concern for executives and IT administrators. How secure are cloud services, really, and what can organizations do to better protect their data and users? Here’s a short introduction to “How secure are cloud services?” that provides some answers.

While security was a major concern in the early days of the cloud, today a majority of IT professionals say the cloud is more secure than legacy on-premise systems.ⁱ Because they serve a large number of customers, cloud service providers have the budget and infrastructure to develop, manage and upgrade stronger security systems than many enterprises can manage.

How are cloud services secure?

Cloud services have multiple strategies to protect data and infrastructure, including:

Redundancy. Cloud services typically store multiple copies of each piece of data in different geographic locations.
Physical security. Cloud service providers use data centers that are protected by state-of-the-art physical and logical security measures.
Expertise. Cloud service providers typically have teams of experts in cloud security helping to monitor security 24/7/365 to protect against a wide variety of threats and risks.

How secure are cloud services when protecting against threats?

Cloud service security teams benefit from up-to-the-minutes threat intelligence, enabling them to take steps to protect against a wide variety of emerging threats.

How secure are cloud services from human error?

In most cases where attackers breach cloud security, human error within the company or a third-party provider is at fault. This would argue that rather than asking “How secure are cloud services?”, companies should be asking “How securely am I using cloud services?” and developing precautions and protocols to prevent human error from initiating a breach.

How secure are cloud services vs. legacy systems?

Legacy systems – terminals, workstations and browsers – are from a time before cyber crime became prevalent. Security measures to protect these systems can be unreliable and challenging to implement. Cloud services, on the other hand, have been developed at a time of great awareness of the need for security and are often designed with security in mind.

How secure are cloud services when it comes to web-based attacks?

Attacks on web applications are among the most common security event today, targeting both service provider and un-premise environments. According to a 2012 Alert Logic report, cloud services environments tend to repel more threats than on-premise environments, even though they receive a higher percentage of attacks.

i https://clutch.co/cloud/resources/security-trends-in-enterprise-cloud-computing