When businesses turn to the cloud, perhaps the biggest point of concern is security of data. Enterprise owners are keen to know how secure the cloud is and what the security loopholes are. There are divergent opinions about the safety of data in the cloud; while some are doubtful about data security on it, others feel that clouds are more secure than on-site servers. When security is your focus, it really depends on the nature of organization in question and whether the leadership is right in choosing the cloud.
- One of the first things that you need to realize is that the security market for the cloud hosting is gradually expanding. As reports suggest, market for cloud security products are growing every day and the demand for these products is what is driving such growth. Incidentally, according to reports by Cloud Security Market, the size of the cloud security market is expected to be almost $9 by the next two years.
- Another important element of cloud security is the realization among businesses that data breaches are very common. In the recent years almost 50% of businesses all over the globe have experienced such breaches in some form or the other. The data breach problem did not spare even the bigger players like Home Depot or Target or JP Morgan Chase. Reports by Ponemon Institute revealed that the numbers of companies facing data breach situations had gone up dramatically since the previous years.
- There is no denying the fact that one of the biggest points of contention for cloud hosting users is whether the private cloud or the public cloud is more secure. It is true that the private cloud will give businesses greater control over their data initially. They guarantee easier compliance to the HIPAA and PCI standards but that will not make it more secure than a public cloud. The real test of security depends upon how the buisness adopts a security strategy and how it uses technologies.
- Amongst the most important IT initiatives that were declared by businesses in 2015, while cloud security was not directly mentioned, both the “cloud” and “security” factors appeared to be the most talked about ones. While 36% of IT personnel declared security to be the primary concern, 31% declared the cloud to be their most important focus.
- When you consider using cloud computing technologies for your business, you will automatically think about backups and cloud storage. While cloud storage is recommended for businesses, it comes with its fair share of drawbacks. Storage has been declared as one of the riskiest applications in the cloud by most companies. Following this were applications which dealt with accounting and finance.
- More often than not, hacking from outside is considered to be the severest threat. But, the truth is that it is employees within a company which are also a huge threat to cloud security. In 2015, Experian that declared that employees were responsible for majority of company data breaches. The problem appears to be growing worse because the employees often work remotely and use their own mobile devices to get sensitive data outside the company’s network.
- The truth is that there are many businesses that do not have proper security policies in place to deal with data security and breaches. While a substantial number of businesses do not have any security policy, there are many which do not even know whether the company has security policies or not.
- With the emergence of the Internet of Things, the market is expected to cross $26 billion units by the year 2020. The IoT will automatically bring forward many new security threats and challenges for the businesses using this technology. Data collected by IoT devices are likely to create far more vulnerabilities and cyber attacks are going to be more frequent than ever.
What is different about cloud security?
Cloud security components being a part of a dynamic environment, makes people doubt on its capabilities. There are so many security threats that misguide people and don’t believe in the IT security provided by any of the cloud security providers. For this one needs to understand the technology behind the word “cloud”. With cloud security, the traditional perimeters for defense are all removed. The secure hybrid cloud protects your website from unsafe credentials, account hijacks, malicious intruders, etc. There is not a single case of unauthorized access by the use of strong passwords and 2-factor authentication.
When everything is on software then there is nothing to worry about. The basic components of security in cloud computing are all embedded in a cloud computing infrastructure. This makes the data more dynamic, scalable, and portable at the same time.
A managed cloud security uses a cloud firewall that provides an added layer of protection. It helps in blocking the unnecessary web traffic acting as a major component of the cloud security
- Last but not least, another important element of cloud security is that in many cases, security tools do not get employed by companies. And even if they do get used, the right ones are not used. While most businesses claim to use VPS connections for more security for data, many of them do not have effective firewalls and do not encrypt data at rest. Only a handful of businesses actually make use of sensitive data tokenization.
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