The basic concept behind public cloud computing is to consolidate traditional behind the firewall services, data, and applications into an elastic on-demand multi-tenant third-party hosted environment. So, is your data more secure in the cloud compared to in the enterprise? One could argue both ways.
Less secure:
- cloud is more attractive and a lucrative target for hackers - higher RoI - if hacked, they get access to consolidated data of all customers.
- virtualization/multi-tenancy creates more attack surface compared to traditional computing model
- you loose control of your data
More secure:
- cloud may protect your data with the very latest security technologies by an expert security team while enterprises may not have that luxury.
- security patches/updates may be updated timely and in a consistent manner across all resources (better security management).
- easier to protected centralized consolidated resources than distributed resources.
- have the ability to correlate audit information from multiple customers to provide better detection and mitigation of attacks.
