Is cloud secure when it is compared with legacy systems?

It has been a long time since the time cloud computing moved forward to enterprise scene and promised to be a new method of computing that assists a company’s infrastructure as well as run applications. It has been a long and difficult slog to agreement; nevertheless, the same concern is brought up now just as often as it did all the time has gone; it means security.

In fact, more than three quarters of the respondents, about 76 percent, claimed that security is their top worry in terms of services which are based on cloud and more essentially, 41 percent of them trusted that all services which are based on cloud are almost unsafe.

The point is whether that is really the case and whether something that leaves a company’s physical estate put it in any more risky in comparison with the situation in the past.

For instance, the iCloud hack, which witnessed the private images of famous people to be leaked on the Internet, was the most serious cloud hack of 2014 due to its influence on the general public. This issue then led to widespread news coverage around the vulnerability of taking advantage of the cloud, which has kept on raising questions about other services which are also based on cloud.

What is more, one of the major concerns for companies is that information that is saved in the cloud is reaching far beyond its control. It could make investment in the top security tools as well as have the most intricate authentication; nevertheless, if the cloud platform is not safe, it is still at risk.

Nevertheless, according to the security intelligence director at Web Root named Grayson Milbourne, this is not only a big concern; yet users are in fact starting to lose their patience as well as belief with cloud storage companies who do not take the important precautions for their customers. Also, no matter what cloud services may be, they are not just competing on price and service any more, they are also fighting against others when it comes to the security feature of their service.

Another idea from Darren Anstee, the director of solution architects at Arbor Networks was that when data was held inside, it is located in a company own control and they are able to determine the level of security to place around that data. When data is transferred to a cloud service platform, this control is decreased as well.

1. On or off?

However, another issue is that whether data in the cloud is much more difficult to protect rather than that on the traditional legacy systems.

First and foremost, the perimeter protection is much the same. Whether it is on premise or inside the cloud, both do as good a mission as they can to prevent attacks from cyber criminals.

However, when it comes to human mistakes, which is as usual the most dangerous problem, employees will possibly malevolent, and then intentions will find it harder to place fixed data inside the cloud.

According to Matt Davies, the senior director of EMEA marketing at Splunk, they are physically eliminated from the location in which the data is kept and do not have the personal relationships with the one that actually has approach to the data. Another debate could be started that the shortage of physical access as well as relationships with people could make data inside the cloud become safer.

But businesses also have to cope with more difficult standards. Businesses with cloud storage need to set up safe data centers which are separately audited as well as adhere to such standards as Soc 2 Type II.