Cybersecurity Benefits of Using Cloud Technologies

11.03.2020 1,937 17

Nick Galov

When considering moving data to the cloud, there are always security issues to keep in mind. There are many worrying factors, such as – will your business be protected against cyberattacks, will your website be safe, can the cloud security handle all kinds of attacks, etc.

To provide protection for websites and applications that rely on cloud technology, cloud security systems issue various levels of control within the infrastructure of the network. For example, businesses have to ensure DDoS protection, data security, high availability, and compliance with regulations within their cloud security provider.

The cloud presents huge opportunities by providing a network that is flexible and scalable, but it doesn’t come without challenges. If cloud security is done properly, it could be a perfect solution to all security issues and create a work environment for businesses worldwide. Web owners need to be ready to protect their sites against the ever-increasing attacks like DDoS and also application-layer attacks.

What Are the Benefits of Cloud Security?

To obtain the benefits of cloud security, you might need to get on board with a reputable private cloud security provider. This can be done without risking your security measures. Luckily, various options are available to choose from.

Here are the top five benefits of a good cloud security solution.

• DDoS protection. A DDoS attack happens when a large amount of traffic is sent to a company’s server by using vulnerable or zombie computers. This traffic flood renders the server useless for hours or days. Proper cloud security prevents this flood of traffic by monitoring, absorbing, and spreading it over points of service worldwide.
• Data security. A proper cloud security solution will protect sensitive information and transactions by having the necessary security protocols in place. These protocols will prevent third parties from intercepting or tampering with the data while transmitting.
• Compliance with regulations. Enhanced infrastructures are managed and maintained by top cloud security solutions for compliance and the protection of sensitive information of companies in regulated industries.
• Flexibility. A good cloud security solution gives you the flexibility to upgrade your security strategy to prevent your server from crashing during periods of high volume traffic. You also have the flexibility to downgrade it after high volume traffic is over to save costs.
• Availability and support. A top cloud security provider should provide uninterrupted support, including 24-hour live monitoring all year round. To ensure that websites and applications are always online, the provider has redundancies built-in.

Top cloud security solutions provide the availability, reliability, and security that companies require to do business all over the world. For a thorough, secure solution to your cloud security needs, advanced cybersecurity features are usually combined with the physical infrastructure.

The Future of Cybersecurity of Cloud Technologies

Because cloud technology has been feared for decades, its unlimited processing power has not been embraced yet. Even though we use it now to store personal things like photos, business files, and even our identity, companies are still hesitant and anxious to use this tech.

Because of this anxiety, cloud security has become one of the most isolated issues IT professionals have to deal with. This is because cloud services are not all equally committed to security.

Here are a few concerns:

• If the cloud is not properly configured, it can lead to bypassing internal policies classifying and protecting access to sensitive data.
• Not all cloud services offer strong authentication, encryption, and audit logging.
• Known flaws getting exploited in the cloud due to failure of maintaining and patching.

Cyberattacks continue to grow year after year, and no industry is safe. The cost of security breaching is astronomical, especially for small businesses, because they might not be able to recover from a data breach liability. The average cost of each record with sensitive and confidential information that got lost or stolen in 2017 was $141, according to the 2017 Cost of Data Breach Study. The total cost of a data breach ran in the millions.

These threats are serious. If cloud technology wants to face them, it needs to grow and evolve to provide a wall of defense.

Is Cloud Security the Future of Cybersecurity?

Traditional and legacy security is often dumbfounded by seasoned attackers launching ransomware and cyberattacks such as WannaCry/NotPetya pandemic. Attackers became today’s cyber spies. To bypass passive, defense-based security measures, they make use of traditional espionage tactics along with disruptive malware.

For security to handle attacks like these, it has to transform into an active profile that hunts attacks as aggressively as predicting tomorrow’s threats.

Cloud security is quite suited for building a collaborative environment that can instantly predict threats through a global threat monitoring system, thanks to other users leveraging the same cloud environment. These threats can then be shared among all users in the cloud simultaneously.

Now is the future of cloud security. Predictive cloud security is so innovative that it will frustrate cyber attackers for years. By using the power of the cloud, this technology makes predictions and protects against future attacks by gathering and analyzing unfiltered endpoint data. This means that attacks that other security products fail to pick up can be identified by predictive security of the cloud technology. That being said, instead of the attacker hunting you, you can now hunt them.

Not only will this approach level the playing field between the attacker and the security team, but it will also provide security with an advantage and shift the balance in the opposite direction.

Cyberspies rely on stealth and surprise to disrupt, steal, and destroy data. Predictive security in the cloud is the next-generation security and works like counterintelligence that hunts the attacker before they attack.

Benefits of Cloud Technology to Your Business

• Higher standards. The high standard that cloud-based security is certain to bring to your business will unlikely be achieved by your locally managed security system or IT team.
• Multi-factor authentication. Cloud security offers higher security standards such as multi-factor authentication that small to medium businesses can’t implement due to lack of time, resources, or skills. A mere combination of a complicated password and unique login ID won’t necessarily be adequate to protect your data because hacking techniques become more effective every day. With multi-factor authentication, however, more than one verification method is used to verify a user.
• Security certificates. Cloud security providers holding compliance and security certifications are more readily trusted by organizations with their data. Qualified staff with experience in cloud server configuration and data security will certainly be employed by providers holding cloud security certifications.
• Less room for error. As technology advances, the need to rely on humans for many tasks is decreasing. Technology takes care of tedious tasks, which means the rate of human-made errors decreases.
• Patch management. Patch management entails installing and managing code changes on systems on the specific network. This is carried out to improve the system by keeping it up to date while fixing security vulnerabilities to block hackers and malware. These security patches also need to be tested to ensure the correct application thereof.