Friday, February 27, 2015

Is your data more (or less) secure in the cloud?

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.